S1leNt RIP said:
I believe in God and while I believe that evolution is possibly outside of my areas of knowledge/research/experience, I find it unlikely given my (woefully inadequate) research on the subject.
Woefully inadequate research? I don't know if you've paid attention to scientific journals over the past 20 years, but it's been in pretty much every issue I can think of. There are literally thousands of papers supporting evolution.
In the scientific community, it is taken as such a fundamental force that it's a fact. It's only slightly less understood than gravity, and only because it exhibits punctuated equilibriums rather than continuous distributions.
It exists, and I've personally manipulated the environment in experiments and watched as bacteria evolved. If it didn't happen, we could use penicillin forever, and HIV would never have been a problem.
You can see it in humans over less than a hundred generations in lactose tolerance (which evolved twice in humans) and things like jaw size. If you really have any serious questions, feel free to ask me. I'm literally an expert.
I think Abortion is killing a living (innocent) being and should be illegal.
The thing here is, so do the pro-choice groups. The difference is where you define "life." Some would like to define it at the moment of conception (which would make every single woman in the United States a criminal as about 20-30% of all pregnancies are aborted before they reach the end of the first trimester via natural mechanisms), some would like to define it after the first trimester where the fetus develops recognizable features, etc.
My personal opinion is that abortion laws are fine as they are, and don't need changing. They prevent the ruination of two or more lives that usually occurs when a drastic money-vacuum (child) enters the world into a family that can't support it. I'd rather see a dozen well-loved, well-supported children than 50 who are a burden in every sense of the word - and grow up knowing it.
I think Pot should be legal.
I may not agree wholely, but I do agree there should be a serious discussion about it. What I do hate are all the pro-Pot memes the supporters spew without any evidence at all. "Nobody's ever died of an overdose," ..... "It doesn't harm your brain or anything else, it is perfectly safe" (most studies I've seen say with chronic use mental abilities take a drastic hit), etc. The supporters act like it's a harmless, when that's not even true for common household spices.
Edit: Oh, and anyone living in America who rages to ANY DEGREE about the "1%". They piss me off! "Rah rah, 1% is evil rah rah, I live better than KINGS of the past. I have nature bent to my will. In summer I am cool, in winter I am warm. I am part of the 1% historically, and right now I'm part of the top 5% alive." UGH!!! Hate that! Who CARES if someone has more money than you! Who CARES what they are doing with it, because when it comes down to it you are just as selfish as those people! Seriously, how many of those same people gave to a charity or non-profit that week? The month? My money is on most of them being hypocritical douche bags!
Whew, that rant was fun.
The issue with the 1% was never that they were rich; it was that they weren't held accountable for (A) - The financial crisis which brought the American banking industry to its knees, and created the worst depression in 70 years. Very few people have been charged, despite nearly every major bank taking part in it. And (B) - They are disproportionately favored by taxes. You've seen Romney's tax return - a whole 12.5% tax rate because he lives off of a trust fund. The average middle class worker is taxed between 20% and 25%. Whether it's a flat tax or closing loopholes, the middle class is paying about double what millionaires and billionaires are paying as a percentage of their gross income. If you agree with that, then we simply don't see eye to eye on economics. ;-)
Another unpopular opinion of mine:
-I think cars should be vastly more expensive to drive and astoundingly more difficult to acquire a license for. With city planning trending towards smaller, more closely knit communities that are based on walking distance rather than house size, I think cars are a bad habit Americans desperately need to drop as an everyday convenience. I would love to see a city that bans most car use and only allows walking/biking/etc. as forms of transport. Not only would every inhabitant be worlds healthier, but imagine all the money saved from the tune-ups, the repairs, the initial purchase, the accidents, and the insurance.
-I think the United States should focus on becoming a leader in Solar power production. It's the only resource that will be around longer than the country (and the world) itself, and nothing angers me more than some 80yr old white bastard going on and on about how there's 150 years worth of oil underneath State XYZ if only we'd allow them to drill and get it out. Such rubbish. It's usually the same idiot who will blame Obama for gas prices, when the United States is actually producing a net positive amount of gas (and exporting it), and doesn't contain any significant amount of fuel reserves. The United States contains less than 20% of all reasonably obtainable oil in the world, and the vast majority is held below countries who we routinely piss off.
-I have no doubt in my head that, if left unaddressed, there will be a massive population problem within my lifetime. Yes, the most-developed nations are leveling off in terms of population growth, but the world is still growing at an unprecedented rate. We're already struggling with the logistics and capacity of 7B people, and when 10B hits all you'll see is more wars over resources. It will be war, and it will deliver horrenouds amounts of death unless we can slow down or reverse some of the population growth.
