I never said that. Geeze, way to overblow and misconstrue things to get your opinions heard. I'm not going to bother trying to have a discussion with you next time. Any old idiot can take single sentences out of context to make their point. Good day.

I'm not sure what your friend is really like. But I've heard this sort of rabbid commentary before, and it is really not all that hard to trigger.

Why would we want that? Here we are talking about a welfare program that costs productive members of society money. The poor/dependent classes are just that, poor, dependent and unproductive. You make it seem like we do it to get benefit from them, when in actual fact we don't get anything from them besides crime.

Perhaps you were talking about how the dependent class is easily manipulated to gain votes. That I can agree with, and it makes a whole lot more sense than the "slavery" idea. No wonder I keep hearing politicians calling for it, and my peers denouncing it as unfair as they already give to charity in local institutions.

That is your opinion, and you're welcome to follow it. The rest of us will listen to the actual women around us in an open and honest context. Now take your man-bashing elsewhere, buddy.

The amount of man-hate in this is just staggering. Women and men are individuals, and they live in a society filled with other individuals. We're all expected to grow up and learn to deal with life. That means telling the jerk breathing over your neck that he is being inappropriate. But what it absolutely does not mean is that an entire gender needs to bend over backwards and act shy to not offend the opposite gender. Or for the other gender to act coy and play a complicated mating ritual in order to ascertain mating intentions and to approve them covertly; while at the same time the other side is not allowed to signal those intentions. Ridiculous.

Now, I don't know what your reasoning behind this is. Or how you made the jump in logic that says it's somehow "not okay" until the female approves and/or initiates. Yet, you don't hold women to the same standard. Because if you did, and people were to subscribe to your one-sided and sexist ideas then no one would ever procreate.

Reading one of your other comments now, I notice you seem to think that such actions are inappropriate in work settings. Why? Where do you draw the arbitrary line between pursuing friendship and pursuing intimacy with a colleague? Since it is okay to make friends with your fellow colleagues, which is a social activity, why is it not appropriate to make an intimate one? On top of that, you are not the only individual in society, and you can't project your own personal biases, emotional conclusions and downright selfish notions of social interaction onto the rest of us. Some people are perfectly okay with and willing to pursue intimate relations with colleagues. If that is a problem with the employer, then they need to individually deal with it. If a colleague is being a jerk at work, you deal with them on a case-by-case basis. That means you mustn't attack a gender because you never grew up and learnt how to deal with possibly romantic and/or sexual advances in an uncomfortable location.

At least the random group of people on the internet don't threaten me with guns for not obeying their silly rules like the government does.

Before someone jumps the gun, no I don't mean that we should be allowed to do anything we want. Don't even bother suggesting it as a retort; it's ridiculously cliche.

You can't assume that 911 was unprovoked. What with all the meddling that the US has been doing around the world, especially in the middle east. American Intervention in the Middle East If anything, it sure as hell made it a whole lot easier for nutjob terrorist leaders to recruit suicide bombers.

It's all fine and dandy to switch over to a new version of python. But unless we can justify it to our client, it ain't gonna happen. The client just isn't going to go for it unless they see some measurable/provable benefit to switching. From their point of view it works, and we'd better damn well not touch it. Unfortunately, the codebase has grown over the years, and sloppy developers have come and gone, leaving the rest of us with a brittle codebase that has very little code-coverage. This is most certainly NOT an ideal scenario when it comes to upgrading, as there are too many unknowns. And that's assuming we could get the client's permission, because yes, the code belongs to them.

Ah yes, the terrorists that use "defence" as a justification for their actions. Perhaps your "fixing" of a non-existent problem is the actual cause for the problem? Violence leads to more violence, and the only way to break that cycle is to stop aggressing against "enemies" and just defend your own if they decide to aggress. They will eventually go away, or become big enough with their aggression to warrant stepped-up responses.

Keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, just stay out of everyone else's lives.

No, it's not. That's what you've been told, taught and conditioned. All the time, every day ordinary people deal with moral issues and make decisions that are based on their own internal morals. It is not difficult. And the only reason, I believe, you say morality is for philosophers is because you're cruelly and sadistically practical and favor the utilitarian solution to a problem, regardless of what people want. This only works if you impose your will and force other people to do your bidding so that YOUR ideas/solutions are implemented.

Now that we have that out of the way, let me explain some things for you. The solution to any and all problems is for you to NOT FUCKING SOLVE THEM. Period. Absolutely, just stay the hell out of it. There is no morality involved in this concept; you just have to realize that what YOU think is irrelevant, as people will have their own individual/personal morals and live their lives based off of them. If you don't like it, move elsewhere and barricade your sound-proof home in a mountain. While the rest of us voluntarily solve our own problems, and work together in cooperative groups (whatever size they may be) to solve the problems we deem necessary, and in the way we deem moral and right.

Does the land belong to someone? Yes? Then Exxon is aggressing by stealing resources from someone's land. In that example, the land owner is the victim and Exxon is the aggressor. Likewise if the landowner and Exxon voluntarily decided to enter into an agreement between one another where natural resources are mined from the landowner's land and shipped overseas for Exxon to sell, and the Mexican government forbids it or imposes restrictions on it, then the Mexican government is the aggressor.

I understand, and I didn't quite want to come out with a comprehensive solution to all war and aggression in two small paragraphs. Just an overal idea and sentiment as you say. It definitely is something that we have to approach, and quite quickly.

I guess it does require a bit of a specific and clearly defined solution in order to not be unambigous. Start with the person that authorized the act of aggression. As things are currently, that is a 'solution' because the slaughter of a nation's soldiers doesn't quite convince the populace of that nation to prosecute their own leaders. If anything, in each state they are usually behind a veil that prevents them from being accountable for the decisions they made during power. Hence why the "external" solution to the problem.

I guess that depends on your definition of "enforce". Perhaps I'm naive, but I think that there are other ways of punishing individuals and states for not conforming to what we as a society have collectively deemed as acceptable. Ostracism and trade embargoes come to mind first. Having states at all, where power and resources can be consolidated and concentrated means that a military will eventually form, even if it is just to defend. Which they might eventually use to bully, attack or intimidate. I'm not entirely sure how we can approach this problem just yet, short of getting rid of states entirely and thereby not allowing power to concentrate.

There are but a handful of very specific scenarios where the soldiers of a warring state are not complicit in the actual war. If you have a choice, you shouldn't opt to kill/murder. No matter how poor, desperate or indoctrinated you are. You make it seem like there is a huge grey area of motivations for participating as a soldier in a war, as if that can excuse their actions. Off the top of my head, the scenarios mentioned above: Threat of direct violence against family. Mentally challenged, and thus tricked. Brainwashed/lied into thinking the other enemy is an aggressor, so you think you're actually defending. In a digital, and increasingly connected society, a lot of the options for tricking/forcing people into doing things is quickly diminishing. The moral line needs to be drawn at the choice each individual soldier makes.

"There are times, sir, when... men of good conscience cannot blindly follow orders." Jean-Luc Picard (ST:TNG)

Imposing your rule over another group of people sounds quite a lot like aggression to me. The way to tell this is if that other group tried to go against your will (whatever that may be), and you have to keep them in line with violence, imprisonment, or the threat of either, then you are clearly aggressing.

The only "law of war" that we need is one that states that war is not allowed, period. If you're an aggressor, you are breaking the "law of war". Seriously, we've come too far as a civilized society to still condone such a barbaric practice as war. If you do anything more than to defend yourself, then you become an aggressor. As far as I'm concerned, if you're an aggressor you forfeit all "rights" to your own safety as you are attempting to deprive others of similar rights, thus making pretty much everything against you fair game. That doesn't even touch on the moral aspects about compelling individuals to murder on your behalf by virtue of conscription and other practices that have a similar effect. And those that get paid to do such aggressing are nothing more than paid murderers.

On a side note, quite a few world leaders (ahem, America) have broken both the above simplistic "law of war", as well as actual torture, war and genocide laws of war that we already have. And we, as a supposedly civilized society, don't even have the backing/support/power to pressure their countries for any sort of accountability. Not to mention the fact that there is no ruling body that has any sort of jurisdiction to remedy this by getting those horrible individuals to a war crimes court. The current laws of war don't work, and are only there to make it unfeasible for smaller/less-powerful countries to fight in an asymmetric force situation. A similar thing was imposed on guerilla warfare when "formal" and "gentleman" warfare required countless fodder to stand in neat long rows to be slaughtered one at a time; essentially making war about who had more cannon fodder.