The Ds who seem to think it would've been better for the Greens to have voted for Gore rather than Nader, probably saw Nader slightly to the left of Gore, and both of thoe miles from Bush; while the people who voted for Nader saw it very differently: http://www.politicalcompass.org/images/USelection2004.gif (that's 2004, not 2000, but the positions are close).

Nader voters realized that Gore was slightly closer to what they wanted than Bush, but that slight difference didn't matter considering how far away these voters were from the two plutocratic sociopaths.

Given the choice between unpopular Gandhi, and the much more popular candidates Stalin and Hitler; Greens would vote for Gandhi. It's an ethical thing: it's better to do the right thing by voting for what you consider good and then be defeated, than it is to vote for the slightly lesser evil and help that evil win.

While I might think my country can make some pretty stupid choices, they aren't the kind that would destroy civilization.

Three more words: Anthropogenic climate change.

Bazinga.

8) Stop voting for the members of corporatocratic parties (for this and many other good reasons), voting instead for people who will reduce the $749 trillion military budget, and spending it instead on preventing ill people from being bankrupted by medical bills. You know, like in other developed countries.

Vegetables and fruit can't feel pain. Some people think causing unnecessary pain and suffering is unethical, and should be avoided. Some Jains take it further and feel it's wrong to kill anything, including insects and root vegetables.

In a PSA Paul McCartney said that "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." The idea was that if someone actually saw the way animals are enslaved, tortured, and slaughtered by the billions (birds and mammals) and trillions (sea food) every year, that they'd become vegetarians or vegans. This turns out not to be true: some people manage to somehow forget when told the truth about where their food comes from and what unfathomable harm is done to get it cheap. Some people simply don't care - enslavement, torture, and slaughter just doesn't bother them if it's not done directly to them - they don't even care about what world they're leaving their overpopulating offspring.

According to 1 Thessalonians 4:16 (the sentence just before the rapture verse) "the dead in Christ will rise first."[1] Those zombies will then join the living raptured in the clouds.[2] All praise be unto zombie ghost Jesus!

I suggest that people who leave clothes around on the 21st, leave clear signs that the now naked raptured were Jewish, Pagan, or Muslim - signs on their shirts, burqas, etc.

[1] 1 Thessalonians 4, The skeptic's annotated Bbible
[2] 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, Bible gateway

Think about the Holocene extinction event and anthropogenic climate change - they make the Tohoku and 2004 tsunamis, Haiti earthquake, and wars look like small potatoes.

Is it also sinful for postmenopausal women or sterile people to have sex? Or people who realize that human overpopulation is the root cause of almost every catastrophe facing the biosphere?

but I am curious to find out if I have a more interesting ancestry than family history suggests. The most recent immigrant in my family AFAIK came to the US

"a 2005 scientific review [Bellis] of international published studies of paternal discrepancy found a range in incidence from 0.8% to 30% (median 3.7%) [...] A study [Schacht 1963] in Michigan of 1417 white and 523 black children found non-paternity rates of 1.4% and 10.1% respectively.[...] A study [Ashton 1980] of 1748 Hawaiian families with 2839 children reported a non-paternity rate of 2 to 3%." -- Rates of non-paternity

"it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve." -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, p. 70

assuming people visited ridiculously low numbers of foreign countries

Maybe they figure slashdotters have a better realization of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change.

"a flight from London to Paris or Brussels emits more than 10 times the amount of carbon per passenger than the train." "To offset the carbon impact of flying to Athens you would have to go without heating, cooking, lighting and all forms of motorised transport for 2 years and 3 months." -- wandsworth.gov.uk

See also the lowflyzone pledge site.

From the largest perspective, for better or worse, a military is a necessary function for a country to survive. Show me a single country with a history longer than 1 year that survived without any form of military service at all...it just doesn't happen.

The Costa Rican standing army was abolished in 1948. See elespiritudel48 (translation) and US department of state articles.

See also List of countries without armed forces.

"Standing armies [are] inconsistent with [a people's] freedom and subversive of their quiet." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to Lord North's Proposition, 1775. Papers 1:231

"The pioneers of a warless world are the young men (and women) who refuse military service." -- Albert Einstein

Humans in large groups are violent, greedy, and persnickety about others taking the things they own...meaning other groups of violent, greedy, and persnickety humans.

One solution could be to not join such large groups unless temporarily such large groups are required to do something good, e.g. work together to build a barn or dam. I've lived in a commune where nobody was violent or greedy, and while many people are violent and greedy, that doesn't mean that armies (which are almost exclusively used to start violence, and further greed) are wanted or needed by everyone.

I suppose there are "good" wars and "bad" wars as the AC's post seems to claim, but it doesn't mean that the guys doing the fighting, killing, and dying are at fault or are evil in some way.

There are many people who think that causing pain to creatures that can feel pain is unethical, and successfully refrain from it. We think that killing is almost always wrong (self defense has almost nothing to do with modern wars), and that volunteering to be trained to become a paid killer is even worse - in modern warfare about 90% of the people killed are innocent civilians.

We (humans, that is) dehumanize the enemy; everyone does.

See Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect for examples of how not everyone is unethical and not everyone dehumanizes others.

The old quote "My country. May she ever be right, but right or wrong, my country!" (Stephen Decatur) doesn't just apply to the US...every citizen of every nation should take up that attitude...and try to fix the things that are wrong.

"Citizenship? We have none! In place of it we teach patriotism which Samuel Johnson said a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty years ago was the last refuge of the scoundrel -- and I believe that he was right. I remember when I was a boy and I heard repeated time and time again the phrase, 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country." -- Mark Twain True Citizenship at the Children's Theater, 1907