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2020-08-14, 12:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2010
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Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
I mean could tell you my take on this but given the last example, but it might be missing the point I mean I pretty I agree with its all equally valid just...I would still look for details even if they have no moral weight, because one orphanage's situation might be different from another and while its all morally the same, there might be other concerns that could influence the decision. (like how many children being cared for, its probably best not to overload one orphanage with too many).
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2020-08-14, 12:37 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2014
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
Personally, i find "smart and efficient" generally leads to "not nice" and thereby to "not good" but i judge each set of actions individually. But i also think that motivation is important in these discussions. You should choose not to torture because torture is cruel and evil, not because it's "not efficient".
Last edited by NorthernPhoenix; 2020-08-14 at 12:37 PM.
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2020-08-14, 12:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2008
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- Munich, Germany
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Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
Moral quandaries that don't have one correct solution have been a topic of various movies and tv shows in the past. One example that comes to mind is the Babylon 5 episode "Believers" (note that this is not an especially good episode, but it fits as an example). It's about a terminally ill child that could be saved by a simple operation. However, the religious beliefs of the child and his parents forbid cutting open his body because it would mean he loses his soul. So you either let the child die or you go against the express wishes of the child and his parents (and potentially force him into eternal damnation, since you can't disprove that particular belief). Neither option is nice, but both are arguably good.
What did the monk say to his dinner?
SpoilerOut of the frying pan and into the friar!
How would you describe a knife?
SpoilerCutting-edge technology
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2020-08-14, 12:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2014
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
No need to reinvent the wheel when examples are out there. The Witcher series again provides more than a few moral dilemmas that can be viewed as a both, either, or neither scenario depending on personal perspective. What it does not provide is what these discussions try all too often to bring: a neat and clean and tidy moral choice with a clear cut Paragon vs Renegade divide. Moral quandaries are rarely so clear and situations can often not be so one-dimensional.
Trolls will be blocked. Petrification works far better than fire and acid.
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2020-08-14, 01:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2013
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
I am going to take that advice with a grain of salt.
1) My example actually achieved the goal of shared premises. (This was the root cause of the problem with the prior argument)
2) Not everyone watches the Witcher.
So even if reinventing was unneeded, it was an efficient and effective solution. I was able to get Lord Raziere to answer Vahnavoi's actual question.Last edited by OldTrees1; 2020-08-14 at 01:22 PM.
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2020-08-14, 02:06 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2020
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
handing her over to an angry mob is just a surefire way to make that mob dead no matter how justified they are in their anger.
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2020-08-14, 02:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2020
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2020-08-14, 02:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2010
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Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
Ah, but I don't know how long she has been there, it could already be spreading so its a moot point anyways: a quarantine needs to be established to keep the corruption from spreading outside of it and those people could used to get infected by trying to touch her and the poison/infection/corruption could continue without her being alive, and her death could make it so that my one source of information of how to combat it is dead, thus dooming the city. thus those people need to be sent away and contained. in any case, trusting a mob of angry random people to competently solve problems like this is probably not a good solution in the short term, nor is it a good habit to pickup in the long term.
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2020-08-14, 04:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2019
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- Somewhere over th rainbow
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2020-08-16, 09:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2006
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Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
The woman accused of witchcraft in a setting where this is believable and witches are very dangerous and evil is giving signs that she is hungry and incapable of getting sufficient nourishment from the coarse bread she’s being fed. However, this bread was chosen because it is known that just about anything else is something a witch can use to brew a potion even using just her own spit and can curse or escape with it.
If she’s innocent, this treatment is needlessly cruel. If she’s really a witch, this treatment still is cruel, but necessary. Good, here, is not nice, because “nice” risks proving the accused’s witchcraft by virtue her cursing the entire town by vanishing in a puff of smoke that releases a dark cloud of plague-carrying mosquitoes.
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2020-08-17, 12:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2019
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
Assuming the premises as true, then the only ethical course is to provide a fair and empirical trial as soon as possible. Any delay is either unnecessarily prolonging suffering, or preventing the witch from being neutralized ASAP. If a trial cannot be provided quickly, then an alternative means of confinement will need to be found. Perhaps the witch could be temporarily moved far away under guard. Maybe Create Food and Water could be used to provide a food source that is nourishing but also insufficient for potions. Regardless of what's the "nice" way, the smart way actually kinda coincides with niceness here, since just keeping the "witch" in town and treating her like crap risks serious practical repercussions if she turns out to be powerful, and is a serious ethical problem if she is not.
This of course, also seems to assume that being a powerful witch is inherently criminal, which is usually not the case. I'm making a further assumption that there's something magic-seeming and bad that the "witch" has been accused of.Last edited by AdAstra; 2020-08-17 at 12:16 AM.
The stars are calling, but let's come up with a good opening line before we answer
Spoiler: Homebrew of Mine
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2020-08-17, 11:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2006
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Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
I did note that one of the premises was that "witches are dangerous and evil." Feel free to presume as a given that something about being a witch requires you to be malign and harmful and wicked for purposes of this example. Perhaps you must eat babies to maintain your life and power and appease your dark master, or something.
The point is that, no, even your "practical and nice" options that you require for greater morals and ethics are not something you can do immediately, so for now, she has to suffer discomfort and indignity. Sure, speedy trials are great and to be pushed for. But right now you cannot be both good and nice.
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2020-08-17, 04:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2014
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
For an additional perspective:
I worked in a Psych Hospital. When a patient was having a psychotic episode, throwing chairs, and/or trying to hurt someone, we had to restrain them.
This typically involved putting them on the floor as quickly as possible, holding them down as they screamed and flailed and relived their trauma under our bodyweight, sometimes even needing to pull down their pants and give them an emergency injection in the buttock. (The medicine needs a large mass of muscle to dissolve into, and that's the easiest spot to stick when someone is on the floor face-down.)
These patients did not like what we did. It certainly wasn't a nice thing to do, holding someone on the ground and giving them an injection of narcotics against their will.
But it was also the right thing to do, since it prevented them from harming themselves or others, and in the long run allowed us to give them the necessary treatment that stood a chance of reducing their suffering overall, so I'd call it Good.
In real life, doing the right and Good thing often requires doing things that are not nice.
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2020-08-17, 06:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2014
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
I feel like that doesn't touch on the most important factor. Are you consoling the person as you "help" them this way, or are you telling them "take that you idiot, it's what you deserve for being so broken". That makes all the difference. And assuming you don't say anything, what were your (theoretical) thoughts closest to of the two? That's the difference between nice and not nice.
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2020-08-18, 02:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2019
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
So, okay, we have the premises of:
-Witches are inherently evil and also cannot be trusted to leave innocents alone.
-Witches can make a potion out of anything except ****ty food
-No one is around that can make food that is at least nourishing, so presumably no Create Food and Water.
-The trial is happening as fast as possible, but it will still take a while.
-You can't move the maybe-witch somewhere safer for the populace if she manages to pull something.
I will point out that being good OR nice usually includes how you plan for the future. Generally, for both traits, it's possible to make up for a compromise now by being better in the future. And I think that's important. What you intend to do in the future can significantly affect the goodness or niceness of your actions in the present. For example, if you let a repentant enemy surrender, that's generally good. If you let a repentant enemy surrender, but plan on having their family slaughtered tomorrow, that makes your in-the-moment decision pretty dang nasty and cruel.
I think, in this case, it's possible to be both Good and Nice because of how you intend to act if the maybe-witch is found innocent. A particularly not-Nice Good person would probably recognize the mistake, and perhaps attempt to seek justice if people were throwing around false accusations on purpose, but wouldn't necessarily be sorry for the situation, and would likely consider it the cost of doing business. For a Nice Good person, this is kind of a worst case scenario. You compromised your morals for nothing, and caused suffering to an innocent. Potentially, you fell for an *******'s tricks, assuming that treachery was involved in the accusations. Restitution and justice would be a priority in this situation, and particularly the further well-being of the not-witch. A Nice person would probably take it upon themselves to not only seek practical remediation, but also help restore the accused's reputation and ensure no one is going to give her a hard time.
Of course, a not-nice Good person could also be very interested in restitution and be very upset if the accusation turned out to be false. Even in that case, I think the reasoning would be different. For a not-nice person, it's a matter of justice. For a Nice person, it's a matter of righting a wrong that they committed, a more personal matter.The stars are calling, but let's come up with a good opening line before we answer
Spoiler: Homebrew of Mine
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2020-08-18, 08:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2014
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
If holding someone down and forcing an injection upon them is "nice" so long as you're thinking positively about the victim, you've got a very strange definition of Nice that doesn't keep with the most common definitions, such as:
pleasant; agreeable; satisfactory. (Google)
Polite; kind (merriam webster)
Pleasing; agreeable (also MW)
amiably pleasant; kind (dictionary.com)
pleasant in manner; good-natured; kind. (Lexico)
That last one borders on your definition, but if you can visit any sort of suffering upon a person so long as you do it because you like them, then being Nice is all but meaningless. Characters in the Yandere trope are nice, by your definition, because at least they want their object of affection to be happy and genuinely believe capturing them is the first step towards that long-term happiness.
So, no, I reject this definition of "nice" out of hand. No matter how much I wished well for the people I was restraining, I never, ever, EVER, walked away with the illusion that I'd done a kind, pleasant, amiable, polite, or agreeable thing to them. They relived trauma under my hands and it was a tragedy. Every. Single. Time.
It was an infliction of trauma. Every. Single. Time.
Don't come in here and try to convince me I was being nice, no matter how much I cared about them. Doing the right thing in the worst of circumstances often requires doing things that will make you feel like a bad person, but were the only good options.
I'll not come at you with hostility because I know you've never worked in psych, and have no idea how bad things can get on a daily basis, even on a good day. But I'll say this: Accept that you don't know what you're talking about, and that I have seen and experienced some things that you do not want to know about, and take my word for it:
Nothing about a restraint is "nice," no matter how much I like the kid I'm restraining. (I worked with kids aged 4-17)
Nothing about my restraints were needlessly cruel, and I often was mournful, or occasionally relieved when it was over.
But they were never "nice." Nice goes out the window when you chuck a chair at another patient or me, no matter how much I like you. At that point it's creating safety, no matter how much you hate me for the next several minutes to 2 hours.
So yeah. Hard no to this idea. There's no backing for it, whatsoever.
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2020-08-18, 10:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2013
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
Um, NorthernPhoenix might be saying something different.
Consider "take that you idiot, it's what you deserve for being so broken".
Pleasant? No
Agreeable? No
Satisfactory? Maybe
Polite? No
Kind? Maybe, by prima facie No
Pleasing? No
Agreeable (repeated)? No
Amiably pleasant(kinda a repeat)? No
Kind (repeated)? Maybe, but prima facie No
Pleasant in manner (kinda a repeat)? No
Good-natured? Is the verbage good-natured? Maybe, but prima facie No
Kind (repeated)? Maybe, but prima facie No
I think NorthernPhoenix is trying to describe a sufficient condition for something to not be nice. And conversely the lack of a sufficient condition for !A is a necessary condition for A. (P->!Q Q->!P)Last edited by OldTrees1; 2020-08-18 at 10:18 AM.
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2020-08-18, 12:28 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2010
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Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
Dude, I think you and NorthernPhoenix should least tread with caution. Your talking about something you don't know about to someone who does. your logic is fine, but I think I'll take I'mNotTrevor's experiences over abstract white room conditions. and I don't think its all that illogical to assume that if your getting physical with someone conditions are way past nice in any form. a few words won't change the fact that your already like slamming them to ground and holding them from doing something or other.
though personally if someone is saying that particular hurtful statement like that to someone in need of help, I don't think they're good at all. there is a difference between being a rude good person and being an actual jerk who doesn't care for the suffering he causes. such a statement implies they think so lowly of someone that they probably aren't actually doing good; your already restraining someone which isn't nice, specifically insulting them when their mental health is what your there to treat? crosses a line just a little. that kind of statement if done too frequently could negatively impact someone's mental health, make them see themselves that way since your not exactly talking to someone mentally healthy enough to shrug it off. "good is not nice" has its limits. its just that most shows that use the trope are focusing on problems that aren't mental health while ones that do often make the protagonists nice because otherwise they wouldn't be sympathetic when confronting mental issues.Last edited by Lord Raziere; 2020-08-18 at 12:29 PM.
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2020-08-18, 12:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2013
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
Um, I was taking a sentence and seeing if the verbiage of that sentence could be described by a list of adjectives. I was very very cautious in how I limited the scope of what I said.
I didn't even say whether I agreed or disagreed with NorthenPhoenix's claim that X was a sufficient condition of Y being not nice.
So, if you think there was any more caution that could be applied, I would love to hear it. That was such a bland post I am surprised.
@IamNotTrevor RE the trauma
I said nothing about the trauma in my post because my comment was very very narrow in scope. Trauma is a form of suffering, it is prima facie horrible painful and not nice.Last edited by OldTrees1; 2020-08-18 at 01:02 PM.
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2020-08-18, 01:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2014
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
The issue is that I think you misread the post. While there are question marks involved, it's not a questioning post. There is an assertion. Namely, that the attitude of the Psych Tech "makes all the difference" between if that interaction is nice or not.
That's the claim I'm rejecting out of hand. It's ludicrous on its face, as shown by the Yandere character trope fulfilling this requirement of nice.
A Yandere being a trope of a character who is in.love with another to the point of obsession and willingness to inflict violence upon their beloved if it means they can keep them close, ie willing to knock them out and tie them to a bed. This being done because they guinely believe this will lead their object of affection to greater happiness with them. By the requirements given, they fit.
Which is absurd on its face, hence my rejection.
I don't think you overstepped any bounds, though the tone was a smidge dismissive in the first sentence. (Which I didn't attribute to malice. It's the internet, and I've seen you around. It's not your style)
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2020-08-18, 04:29 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2013
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
1) Yeah, that claim, if it is being made, is to be rejected out of hand.
2) I am reading a different, and lesser, assertion in that post than you are. Basically, if the Psych Tech decides to be a mean cruel douche about it, then it can't be nice regardless of the procedure. Aka the claim that the wrong attitude can be a sufficient condition for it being not nice, and thus the right attitude can be a necessary condition for it being nice.
3) I might be wrong about which assertion is being made, I just habitually assume the more plausible interpretation.
Thanks for also following Hanlon's razor. It helps over the internet.Last edited by OldTrees1; 2020-08-18 at 04:34 PM.
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2020-08-18, 05:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2014
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
#2 is a rehash of the assertion being made. It's the same assertion in different wording. Ie, "if the Tech likes the patient and wants good things for them, tackling them to the ground and administering a shot against their will is now a Nice action."
That's the exact assertion I have rejected out of hand. That the Tech can be unecessarily cruel would push it out of being an action done for Good. I have seen Techs call codes more for vengeance than genuine need and I've even seen a tech bite a kid. Those actions were neither nice, nor Good.
Ensuring someone's safety (and the safety of those around them) is a Good deed. It does not require being pleasant, amiable, gentle, or kind about it. If my friend was drunk and about to do something lethally stupid, I would sock him right in the eye if that's what it took to make him stop. And I'd have no pretenses about that being a nice thing to do. I punched my friend in the face. But, it was the Good thing to do, since it saved his life.
Nice has a very narrow definition. Good has a vast and broad definition. It is impossible that something as narrowly defined as "nice" can apply to all the broad happenings that are Good, without diminishing what Good means.
Edit:
No problemo on the razor, my guy. Since moving away from Hospital work I have tried to channel some Bob Ross energy into my life.Last edited by ImNotTrevor; 2020-08-18 at 05:19 PM.
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2020-08-18, 06:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2013
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
I said P -> !Q and I said Q -> !P. I did not say !P -> Q.
If P (having a mean cruel douche attitude) is a sufficient condition of !Q (not being nice), then !P (not being a mean cruel douche) is a necessary condition of Q (being nice). However that does not imply we can conclude if !P is a sufficient condition of Q. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent)
You rejected !P -> Q, and I would too. However I think P -> !Q is a fair statement and thus Q -> !P is also a fair statement.
Yes, I agree. Earlier in the thread I made the case that even if we presume being nice is inherently virtuous*, good is not always nice and things that are nice are not always good.
*Not universally accepted, but the fairest starting point if I want to defend my conclusion.Last edited by OldTrees1; 2020-08-18 at 06:52 PM.
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2020-08-18, 07:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2015
Re: Good Isn't Nice? Get Out Of Here!
Maybe we need to look in the Book Of Exalted Deeds to find the definition of Good.
It's time to get my Magikarp on!
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2020-08-18, 07:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2014
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2020-08-18, 07:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2015
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2020-08-18, 07:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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2020-08-18, 07:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2015
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2020-08-19, 10:01 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2013
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2020-08-19, 10:03 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2015