I fundamentally disagree that this distinction exists, and even if it did this is not a situation where it would apply.

But it does exist; preaching is persuading or guiding others to follow your own beliefs. If no distinction existed then we would be mechanically bound to preach what we believe, and we’re not, so it’s a choice.

Everyone is a hypocrite to some degree. There are levels of hypocrisy that are breathtaking, and levels that are just meh.

‘Thou shalt not kill’ is a biblical commandment, not a principle. It comes from the fundamental principle of harm minimisation, and the two examples you gave are different (extreme) applications of that principle, see: the trolley problem etc. It’s morality for babies; looking at extreme black and white cases to be able to get a clear, consensus issue. Life is rarely that simple. Morality is never that simple.

They straight up went “when I break my own moral principles it doesn’t feel as bad as when others break them against me”

I’m not sure, that seems like another extreme interpretation of something more nuanced.

This behaviour is morally no better than that of megachurch pastors who preach the immorality of gay sex and get caught paying men to fuck them in the ass.

OP didn’t say they preached their morals though. Holding morals and preaching them are different things. I’d put this more in the category of people who pray secretly to a different god than the state-enforced religion, since OP is living in a capitalist society whilst not holding capitalist values.

I think there’s got to be room for some grey areas in morality. I abhor late-stage capitalism, but I would not rather die than shop at a chain supermarket.

88 Fingers Louie, NOFX, Pennywise, Deviates, Rancid

Eggs is a different topic

~again you, saying that eggs are separate from veganism.

You appear to be disagreeing with yourself, never mind me.

Veganism IS morally correct

~that’s you. That’s you talking about veganism.

You’re proving my point quite nicely

Veganism is the topic. Vegans don’t eat eggs.

I don’t think you get to make a black and white, general argument about this. How about this: if a person raises and cares for a chicken, giving it a charmed life it would have otherwise never had, but takes and eats its unfertilised eggs, then that’s not morally wrong.
It’s just not as obvious as people think, and your first sentence is a naive oversimplification and a great example of the kind of lazy argument I’m talking about. But I don’t want to get into it with my friends since it’s such a touchy subject, and I’ll never get a decent conversation about it online.

I love vegans. A few of my friends are vegan. There are two things some vegans will say which boil my piss, however. First is that they have a moral high ground because they don’t eat animals. This isn’t a given, it’s a complex and nuanced argument I’d happily partake in if the other party weren’t approaching it with a top-down belief that they’re already in the right. Second is the notion that we should all be vegan to save the planet from climate apocalypse. I don’t want this comment to get too long, but I have multiple problems with this faulty line of reasoning, and it muddies the waters. The only likely effect of it is that less progress is made on stopping global heating. So the upshot is that these people are literally sacrificing the ecosystem they purport to care about in order to bang their drum. Fuck that.

You’re denying the moon landing happened although the moon landing definitely, demonstrably happened. You’re getting downvoted for peddling batshit.

My training is in applied mathematics, so I’m only conceptually aware of strange attractors. It’s my understanding that they are chaotic systems that tend towards a stable state. As such I’m a little skeptical of the claim that the universe itself is a strange attractor, since it is broadly predictable and hence not chaotic, and it’s expanding and thus not tending towards stability!

What caused the initial imbalance, and what prevents it from happening again?

Now you’re talking about some of the biggest unsolved problems in physics :)

I don’t know if it necessitates a creation myth, though. The big bang theory doesn’t imply a creator, but also doesn’t require a steady state.

What’s this about a strange loop? I don’t know if I’ve heard of this before.

I suppose that’s fair, since “looks the same in every direction” is a bit of an oversimplification. The principle is an assumption, rather, that we are not privileged observers, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It then follows that we should be very interested to understand why when it doesn’t.

I can’t agree with you that the assumption of universal entropy increase is at all unreasonable. The laws of thermodynamics appear to hold everywhere, therefore entropy must be increasing everywhere. England’s extrapolation to presume that life is an expression of this law might be tenuous, but the law is pretty much ironclad. That’s not to say that structure can’t arise; it clearly can because: hello. But the tendency of the universe as a closed system with a one directional arrow of time is heat death. That’s just a result of thermodynamics. Eventually.

Jeremy England proposed a while back that life is just an expression of entropy increase. Interestingly, if this could be verified (I don’t think it can) it would point to life being universally abundant.

That we’re not special is one of the founding foundational principles of astrophysics, the Copernican Principle. It goes that we aren’t special, we don’t have a privileged viewpoint, and therefore the universe should look the same in every direction. It does get applied in other fields of science in one form or another, since it’s more a way of thinking than a theory as such. Again, it’s not falsifiable but it does seem reasonable.

This is a valid reading of the Fermi paradox. But just for balance I’m going to devil’s advocate all over it.

The chances of life to occur are small enough,

Not known. At the moment the data set is one habitable planet = one occurrence of life, so the odds might be very high indeed, even approaching 1:1

The chances of evolution to pass through multiple extinction events and producing a being capable of higher intelligence is even smaller,

They are smaller, but how much smaller is impossible to tell. What if extinction events are less frequent than they are here? What if 100% extinction events are as rare as they are here? What if intelligence is a natural point of evolution everywhere?

The chances they have done this faster than humans is smaller still,

This one’s not true. The earth is relatively young at 4 billion years compared to 15 billion for the universe. A billion year headstart is completely plausible

The chances they have evolved close enough to us to have visited is near impossible.

Agreed that the earth’s position in the milky way is a bit of a galactic backwater. At 25000 light years from the centre, stars are more sparse here than they are at the centre. But our nearest star is 4ly away. We could have a probe there within half a century with our current technology if we wanted to. So I disagree on the “near impossible” part.

The universe is huge, there’s almost certainly life elsewhere - but to ask whether they visited earth is like speculating on whether ghosts exist.

Can’t really argue with that. Until we see some evidence, ghosts and galactic visitors are in the ‘conspiracy nut’ bin. But it doesn’t mean life on other planets doesn’t exist. There are many theories why we wouldn’t have seen or met alien life if it does exist. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.

Also the universe is expanding at such a fast rate that unless we develop faster-than-light tech, we will never reach another solar system.

Hubble expansion isn’t a big factor at the galactic level. Galaxies are traveling away from other galaxies at relative speeds faster than light, but for stars within the galaxy, the scale is infinitely smaller and the expansion is so small it’s difficult to even measure.

It does have this! Amazing, thanks!

Thanks for the tip. I was sitting on a train today and I hit the back security ring against the headrest and the whole headset nearly came off. I was wondering how sturdy it might be. Now I know, thanks!

Thank you!

E: they’re not available in the UK! Dammit, the search continues…

I just tried this and it works really well!

If you find a good one, and you remember, please let me know. I’d love to find one that lasted more than a few years.