zpharer

Good luck on your journey.

If you ever do find yourself on the fence about getting professional help, please try it. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised.

To hear it from my female friends, they have to put up with a lot of bullshit that men don't have to deal with.

I'd weigh lifting 100's of millions of people out of extreme poverty as much more morally important than avoiding stagnant American middle class wages.

Lifting 100's of millions of people out of subsistence farming levels of poverty is a massive good. Probably one of the greatest moral accomplishments of the last 100 years. Your comparison to a Chinese bureaucrat buying an iPhone trivializes that.

The idea of committing to a trade policy which would have left them living in extreme poverty sounds horrendously evil. Likewise, pulling trade now could do great harm.

If the worst interpretation of your fears comes to pass, and we get WWIII, then yes. Maybe you're right. However, can you back up your claim with enough certainty to justify harming so many people so greatly?

I disagree with your second paragraph. I don't see how humanity being a product of time and chance implies that evil is an illusion. For instance, I think the claim "suffering is bad" is true regardless of whether a God or chance created humans.

This is a frequent misconception though. See the Euthyphro dilemma for a rebuttal. TLDR: are things right/wrong because god says so, or does God say so because they are right/wrong. The former implies a completely arbitrary morality. The later implies that morality is independent from God.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/#EutPro

This happened to me actually.

Is a 1930's house really equivalent in value to a 2016 house though? I would expect that the price increase is at least partially due to us know having nicer/bigger houses (bay area excepted).

Couldn't that be compared to, say, selling protective sportswear. That is also selling protection from harm. Now if the researcher threatens to auction off the exploit...