recommend finding your most sports-watching friend, and asking to tag along the next time they watch sports. sports bars are loud and obnoxious; home viewings can be fun and cheerful. i suspect your wit and humor would be greatly appreciated by the other attendees!
sf is the relatively much younger city, and radically reinvented itself as few as 60 years ago. by that metaphor, i am not surprised that its ideas smell more fresh.
yes! i understood your meaning, and intended to respond to it! i see the argument you are making, but disagree with its conclusion: asking "which of these events is worse?" is a type error. they are incomparable.
should britney spears be forced to perform in order to save a life? should the trolleyman make a Toxic choice? <-- these questions are so contrived that they are not meaningfully answerable. the 'correct' response is "please stop placing me in hypothetical situations!"
referring to your ladder, what i mean is this. hearing the news of event number 1 may have a larger impact on me than the news of event number 5. however, this is not at all the same as making a choice between the two events. if presented with such a choice, one 'should' kobayashi maru. any other response is morally and ethically bankrupt. at the very least one 'should not' make the decision frivolously: "oh, yep. option 5. already considered it. give me something harder next time, huh?" disgusting.
(it may be possible to appeal to an exoself, who is able to sort between the potential news items, but this brings in rather more metaphysics than i am comfortable making claims about. specifically, it's not clear to me how to reason about the interaction between the self's and exoself's desiderata.)
to resolve your slope, it is 'obvious' to me that items 1-5 are equal, while 6 and 7 are in different categories. i myself may have specific revealed preferences between 1-5 (though, see above), but my selfishness is not an ethical principle. nor are my emotional responses my barometer of what's good.
i do not find these events to be comparable, after a great deal of reflection.
I feel incredibly lonely still
is this feeling justified by the upcoming apocalypse?
i found the joke out of tone in this piece, and not funny enough to justify the offense. (indeed, the only "humor" is the shock value.) i believe the writing would be stronger without it.
to flip the question around: what does the vulgarity add, for you? why does this essay need vulgarity?
perhaps a PAC run by dath ilan-style liquid democracy principles.
this is good advice for exactly 50% of the population, right? like, somebody needs to be reading the messages you are sending.
At the ass crack of dawn
hey! if i may: that's a creepy way to phrase it!
this. if what you want from these people is a set of NPC punching bags, then by all means. but perhaps you would find value in helping them achieve insight.