What would the argument be for and against this statement?

Please keep in mind that this post is not intended to debate who is right and who is wrong in the war, but rather if Israel’s strategy is effective. Policy effectiveness in other words.

Israel’s end-goal is to end hamas, and with the current trajectory it is on, it just wants to keep killing until hamas has fully collapsed. Here is the problem with this issue though: wouldn’t you be creating ADDITIONAL members of hamas for every person you kill? I’m sure any person would seek whatever means necessary to make you meet your end if you are the cause of their father or mother’s death regardless of if their mom or dad was a Hamas member or not. Does Israel’s strategy really reduce members of hamas? All it is doing is creating additional members in my opinion.

Thanks to all of you who are engaged with this subreddit and contributing to its content.

As the election approaches, this subreddit is being increasingly inundated with posts on (often repeated) several specific controversial topics (especially transgender equality, Israel/Palestine, US immigration, and the candidates, parties and policies related to the US election). Often, these posts are one-sided, which in turn generates lots of rule-breaking responses. In addition, a substantial influx of bot and troll activity has inundated these discussions with uncivil discussions, often long after the post has dropped from the top of feeds. (E.g. we are receiving lots of "appeals" of auto mod removals without even a presence that the comment actually followed the subreddit rules.)

This increasing activity is 1) overwhelming the mod team, 2) getting pretty redundant and 3) might be part of illicit efforts to affect the US election with faked public outrage on various topics.

Therefore, the mod team is considering making posting a fully-moderated activity. This would mean new posts will sit in a queue until being affirmatively approved by the moderators, rather than being immediately posted, and only removed if reported to/discovered by the moderators to be breaking rules after a robust discussion has started.

If we move forward with this change, it will last until the US election is decided, meaning at least until mid-November 2024, and possibly as late as January 2025. We hope that such moderation would limit new questions to only those that fully conform to the letter and spirit of the subreddit rules, thereby also making it clearer to new participants what the expectations are for the subreddit.

We welcome community discussion regarding this intention before we implement it.

So several of Trump’s cabinet members, advisors from his first term and other high ranking Republicans have now come out and said he is unfit to serve as president, refused to endorse him or even in some cases are supporting Harris: Pence, Bush Jr, Bill Barr, Elaine Chao, etc etc. How do his supporters reconcile this fact? Maybe with older figures like Bush Jr they could claim that they are part of the “swamp”, ie the entrenched political class that Trump is against. But what about the others that were hired by him and were part of his cabinet? I’m looking for intellectually honest answers, even if I don’t agree, not for a condemnation of his supporters.

With Trump mentioning tariffs so often and the left saying Trump doesn't know what tariffs do, how do they each effect corporations? If tariffs tax imported goods from other countries, that just increases the price that company charges, how would a federal tax not do the same thing, but also affect the employees that work for those companies? Long story short. Corporate taxes vs foreign tariffs?

There is a proposal to make the "neighborhood" I live in a protected historical district. In classic American fashion, I've seen a few yard signs in favor and a few against. I'm curious as to both sides of this - the benefits, the drawbacks, how this would affect the area in 5 years, 10 years, etc. For context, I live in a large southern metropolitan city. My neighborhood consists of mostly single family dwellings, some multifamily, several parks, and a handful of restaurants and small businesses mixed in (rare for a southern city lol).

I haven’t been able to wrap my head around this. I’m very young so I don’t remember much about Obama but I do remember our cars almost getting repossessed and we almost lost our house several times. I remember while the orange was in office, my mom’s small business was actually profitable. Now she’s in thousands of dollars of debt (poor financial decisions on her part is half of it so salt grains or whatever) but the prices of glass to put her products in tripled and fruits and sugar also went up. (We sold jam) I keep hearing how Biden is doing so good for the economy, but the price of everything doesn’t reflect that. WHO is the economy good for right now? I understand that our president is inheriting the previous presidents problems to clean up. Is this a result of Biden inheriting trumps mess? I just want to be able to afford a house one day.

I am getting tons of flak from my friends about my openness to support Kamala. Seriously, constant arguments that just inevitably end up at immigration and the economy. I have 0 understanding of what DT and KH have planned to improve our economy, and despite what they say the conversations always just boil down to “Dems don’t understand the economy, but Trump does.”

So how did their past policies influence the economy, and what do we have in store for the future should either win?

Scuttlebutt says that this is a terrible time to pursue acting, because the streaming services have made things terrible, leading to strikes, etc. I don’t understand the logic to this argument. Seems like so many more shows and movies are being produced all the time. What am I missing?

Do dems feel like you got duped into Harris as your candidate?

Recently saw a news post about a Transwoman Mridul Wadhwa ( CEO of a Scottish Rape Crisis Centre) who denied services to sexually-violated women when they asked to be seen only by a biological female for counselling. Apparently the post of CEO was only to be filled by a woman, but Wadhwa somehow got appointed. The This CEO also terminated an employee Roz Adams when she asked for guidance on how to respond to victims’ queries about the assigned counsellor’s gender.

When the terminated employee took the matter to court, the verdict delivered found the CEO grossly out of bounds.

Now trans activists are outraging over lack of inclusivity and rampant discrimination towards Trans community.

The other side - “gender critical” community argues that raped victims have a right to seek female only support.

I want to take an informed stance. I want to be as compassionate as possible, and form an opinion accordingly. What do you guys think?

I can see that we have the biological need to have offsprings to inherit our genes and our wealth or cultural values, but we are also rational beings. Why bring someone into existence if nothing has any meaning and he is going to die? And life itself is full of suffering and now we have climate changes and economical crises. Can you explain both sides of having or not having children?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlsen%E2%80%93Niemann_controversy

Explain both sides of the conflict. Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and currently occupies 1/3 of the island

I noticed most people are strongly team Palestine, especially leftists. I am still looking for objective information "who's worse" in the war, since I know Israel commits genocide, but Palestine also holds hostages and attacked first. I have no opinion on the matter yet. Please explain both sides.

Over the last decade I have watched a debate over whether or not an ID restricts voting rights.

Please explain both sides

I'm trying to understand how plastics can be used and associated with food and other things for ages, approved as safe for such uses, and also be prevalent in forms such as "microwave safe" and such while I also hear that eating food that's been stored in plastics, and specifically heated in plastics, is a source of diet-borne microplastics that are going to give me cancer and destroy my body and brain. What are the 2 arguments here? Thanks!

I remember reading about how the earliest written records of the Buddha’s teachings were written centuries after his death, with the teachings passed down orally from teachers to students. For many, this raises the question of how accurate and trustworthy the written records are in completely preserving the Buddha’s teachings, with some ex-buddhists online claiming this leaves it open to being like a game of telephone where ideas can get distorted.

On the other hand, I don’t think that it having been orally passed down necessarily makes its authenticity questionable. I would imagine you’d want to pass down the full, unedited version of a religious teacher’s words if you’ve devoted your life to serious practice, but idk, maybe there’s more to it? Maybe there are factors that lead one orally passed down tradition more likely to be distorted than others? (e.g. passing down teachings between different languages, as opposed to using the same one the entire time)

I'm interested in discussion of the conduct of the military withdrawal operation. I don't consider the decision to withdraw, in itself, a Biden policy, unless someone can demonstrate a realistic way under the US Constitution for Biden to abrogate the withdrawal agreement which was negotiated by the Trump Admin.

I was having this debate with my friend yesterday. My friend is a bit against AI. I showed her two images (fanart of this fictional couple). They were both a similar style, but I said one was made by a human and the second artwork ChatGPT made. She said it's not art if it's made by AI. I was like what's that supposed to mean? It's still art, whether you believe it's original or not or whatever. Like if I make a story with ChatGPT that's dumb to say 'it's not a story'... like yeah it is a STORY, it's a story made by AI. She said if you want to make a story just write it yourself don't get ChatGPT to make it.

My dad is very tech-savvy and I've grown up always being taught to embrace new technology and change. My dad got us a ChatGPT subscription because he believes that AI is the future and he wants me to master the ways of prompt engineering, because it will help me in my future when I grow up and AI is even more prevalent. My dad supports my use of AI for most things, eg to help me with my writing as I'm an author. Also with school stuff. I don't use AI to just do all my homework. I use it as a tool to help me. As an example, sometimes I've been stuck on really hard maths questions, and unsure of how to solve it. But now I have an excellent teacher (ChatGPT) which I can just ask to explain it to me simply step by step. I can learn way better. Also, it's great for research. I can give it very specific questions that a google search wouldn't be able to help me with.

My dad also got me the paid version of Gemini, and I have to say, I think that its creative writing abilities are much better than ChatGPT's. However ChatGPT is better for research. I use the two AIs for different purposes.

I think my friend's parents are against using AI for stuff like writing stories, making art and music etc. I was having a conversation with my friend's mum about this, and she said that she would never read a book made by AI.

So anyway, my friend said how AI just combines millions of different artworks to make something. She began pointing out the differences in the two images. She pointed to the second one and explained how 'dead' the characters looked, like their expressions and everything, they looked dead inside, especially their eyes etc. She said how the first one looked way better.

I still haven't dropped the bombshell on her that BOTH WERE ACTUALLY MADE BY CHATGPT 🤣🤣

I personally see nothing wrong with people creating stories, songs and artworks with AI. I have added some songs to my playlists that are made with AI- they're absolutely mind blowing and I'd never be able to tell they were AI-generated. And same with art- I've made cover images for my stories, and I've made concept art of my characters, settings and locations. It's really fun.

Also, AI has really helped me enhance my writing and helps me a lot with staying organised.

I made a post a while back that was along the lines of 'Okay, why are people saying ChatGPT is good at writing? I'm an author, and ChatGPT SUCKS at writing. Even ten year olds could write more creative stuff than it.'

Then I got comments like 'Ugh, this piano is so rubbish, it only plays the most basic tunes' and 'a good workman never blames his tools'. All of these made me realise- the output is entirely dependant on your prompt. If you spend lots of time and attention on crafting a brilliant prompt, it has a better outcome. So if someone made an incredible novel with ChatGPT, yeah, I'm going to congratulate them! Because they would have given ChatGPT so much guidance and worked really hard on those prompts and instructions. When writing with AI, sometimes I'll write an entire 5 page prompt. I'm really familiar with AI now and have had a lot of practise with prompt engineering. I've grown a lot since that dumb post I made a year ago. And my views on AI have changed massively.

So anyway, I'd love to hear arguments for both sides.

Toxic masculinity is supposed to describe how the societal norms of masculinity harm society, including men. One commonly said part is that men are expected to be strong and not show emotion, but at the same time they're also typically over emotional and project their emotions onto others all the time which also causes harm to society.

Just based on my limited knowledge of movie sets, making sure the gun isn’t loaded is the responsibility of the props crew, and there are several checks that are supposed to be involved when using an actual fire arm on set.

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I thought it was Alec’s job to show up, perform, use the props given to him in that performance.

So I don’t understand why he’s still facing legal hearings because of this incident. I feel like he’s also a victim in the circumstance unless there’s any evidence to support a possibility he may have loaded the gun himself between takes and had a reason for wanting to kill Hutchins.

Twitter, the website insisting it's called X, has just been blocked in Brazil.

Brazil claims that Twitter doesn't have an office in their country which is a requirement for any company that does business there.

Two weeks ago Musk said he was closing operations in Brazil because the country ordered him to censor certain accounts. When Twitter refused they threatened to arrest the employees in the Brazil office.

Who is at fault here?