>it is unconscionable that we support the literal mass murder and ill-treatment of billions of animals each year when there are alternatives that require no suffering and no death.
There are ways to put down animals which require no suffering.
And no, there are no alternatives to death. Plants are living things too. Why is it okay to murder a plant but not an animal?
>Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information.
Psychology and psychotherapy are almost wholly theoretical, subjective, soft sciences, rather than objectively testable hard sciences like physics and biology.
>psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests".[1][2]
>Also there's no such thing as a negative emotion. Everything we feel is a necessary (or at least programmed) reaction to our experience.
Have you ever met someone with emotional issues, i.e. anger management issues? There are indeed many people with habitual "programmed" emotional responses which are detrimental to their well being and are extremely difficult to manage.
You might like to read the works of the evolutionary pyschologist and athropologist Dr. Paul Eckman. He posits that emotions are valuable life saving forces that help us act quickly in critical situations without having to think. However, our emotional habits have also evolved over many thousands of years, and so many of the emotional responses which may have saved our life as a paleolithic hunter gatherers may no longer be relevant and can have the opposite effect in a civilized society.
Fair enough. Though my concern is not for myself, but rather for any potential great leader who could be silently neutralized/blackmailed/extorted by mass surveillance techniques.
Whether the culprits' organizational classification is public or private is of negligible importance.
>Mass surveillance isn't the same as targeted.
Mass surveillance is the first step in the discovery process, targeted surveillance is the second step after a target has been flagged by the dragnet.
When suing in a case like this, punitive damages would be paid out of the governments budget, rather than the personal assets of those personally responsible, correct?
1,300,000 people die each year in car wrecks and another 20,000,000 - 50,000,000 more are injured and/or disabled.
Google's motto is "Don't be evil" after all. Is valuing short term profits over millions of lives not "evil"?
>Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains.
>sounded like there was a huge cop-out at the centrw of everything that people were trying to ignore.
Yes, like that of the post which I was directing my response towards:
>As a lifelong believer in science...
Science is fundamentally hypothetical, not something to be sure of.
Believe: to accept (something) as true; feel sure the truth of.
"Believing in science" or "believing in creationism" are both opposed to your statement (which I agree with), because they do not leave room for doubt:
>we don't know yet, and we don't know if we ever will
>I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive;
"Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing"
There are ways to put down animals which require no suffering.
And no, there are no alternatives to death. Plants are living things too. Why is it okay to murder a plant but not an animal?