I think the point is that it’s difficult to attribute that to communism in any meaningful way where you’re comparing it to non-communism. Like if those 100 million people would have died anyway, how to do you say ‘it was communism that did it’ since maybe more would have died under the next most likely form of government that would have been in it’s place. How many people have died for Democracy, assuming that both world wars and countless other ones were fought to defend it.

It’s not cheating, especially if it’s anonymous. More like the same lines of watching porn, just a more personal version.

If you were sending them to someone for some other reason it would be closer to cheating.

Just thought of a great debate adjustment. Each side gets equal time, and every time they jump in and interrupt the person whose time it is, they get double that amount of time taken off their next turn…and their mic is cut entirely during that time. The amount of childish, unmoderated foot stomping and disrespect is absolutely ridiculous lately.

At best I think you could say that we have free will at the individual level, even though in the background that free will is driven by chemicals and quantum interactions. Just like a car doesn’t have free will because it’s inanimate, it also isn’t solely jostled around by the environment because it is powered and steered in its own self contained manner. You can keep going down a level and point to this choice being driven by this neuron firing or that sensory input overriding some reflex, but since free will is just a an English phrase coined long before we had any idea of the mechanics, is fair to say that at some level we’re driving our lives in comparison to any external force, and that predestination is so incomprehensible at our level as to be meaningless and “that” is free will, while at the same time there’s nothing above or outside of our consciousness and physics literally steering our mind against the stream of physics allowing us to “decide” to make a decision, rather than simply making a decision based on the infinite flowchart the universe is following.

All of that, of course, is outside the argument of whether all of physics is really predetermined or if it really is just infinities relative dice rolls every time one quantum bundle interacts with other.

When you phrase it that way, though, it makes the ‘you’ part stand out and in that regard you do have free will to do as you choose, it’s just an internal lack of ‘ethereal choices’ we’re lacking. The fact that if the choice were somehow “replayed”, you would make the same choice is kind of meaningless since we don’t experience that….the point at the quantum/chaos theory level is that there is no way to look at the current set of circumstances and say with any degree of certainty what your decision will be. Whether this involves some magic autonomy ‘above’ the chemical and quantum nature of your brain is just semantics as far as whether we’re the one ultimately in the drivers seat or whether we’re just experiencing things from what appears to be behind the wheel. Maybe think of it as sitting on the lap of the universe while we pretend to hit the gas and shift the gears.

Really is an interesting way to look at things. If you look at humans as an ‘organism’, it could be trivial to make massive shifts in output with relatively small changes in behavior. How to go about that might be unknown, but it doesn’t have to happen all at once or in one place. The fact that taking literally an extra minute of the day to deal with waste would double the amount of time we currently spend on it (at least roughly), shows what a huge impact just looking at this data in this way could have.