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How could I have answered their question in a way that does not destroy HN?
What does that say about the life works of Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?
Many prefer poisonous fast food to a healthy home cooked meal, just as many prefer to read twitter comments and click bait than to read a book
The library
Critical thinking skills, independent research, and open dialogue
And do you think it's possible for humans to claim they are driven by altruistic, while actually being primarily hateful, deceitful, divisive, and destructive?
What exactly would it take to convince you of that?
Homemade masks (as opposed to N95) and handkerchiefs are only marginally effective against reducing transmission. Having a strong immune system is a scientifically proven way to reduce your health risk significantly.
What is silly is all the people who are content to do the absolute bare minimum, easiest possible thing to attempt to protect people's health: merely putting a piece of cloth on their face; while at the same time neglecting to put in the work to improve their overall health, and thus their risk to others of spreading the virus.
Adding critical context: Nearly half of americans are obese and/or have heart disease, and ~650,000 are killed by it each year.
How much lower would all those numbers be if americans simply exercised and ate healthy on a regular basis?
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: "Know thyself."
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.
From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
And correspondingly, from evil to good."
-Gulag Archipeligo
[1]https://youtu.be/c8N0TDsjpkE
You may be disinclined to watch this short video, but perhaps you would be surprised to see that it actually gives strong credence to the problems which you are seemingly arguing against, and which I too care deeply about.
Slavery still exists. There are more people living in slavery now than ever before in history.
It seems you are tilting at windmills. Where in this discussion has anyone claimed that words do not have effects?
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered" -MLK
First, you have to get them to care about their own health. 42% of Americans are obese and heart disease kills ~650,000 Americans every year even though it is largely preventable.
Again, the same is true for democratic governments.
If you're concerned about extreme materialism and the effect it has on the environment and mental health, then it seems life would not get worse, it would get better.
The same is true for Google or any corporation, their success is primarily measured by their stock price, not by how well they achieve their ideals
>But the U.S. government doesn’t have a defined purpose, just a long list of functions, and those functions aren’t regularly interrogated. It’s uncomfortable for modern Americans to ask what the ultimate goal of the government is.
Aside from the fact that this an "apples to oranges" comparison, I dont think the author is aware of the Preamble to the Constitution.
>"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."