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User ID: 442
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2mo ago
Feminism and standard liberalism are now the conservative position; 'conservative' in these days means reactionary. Progressives and social activists can put up a big stink, and this forum does like to talk endlessly about them, but their positions are just 10-30 years ahead of the mainstream. The kind of society that was futuristic in the 90s with Star Trek: TNG is now considered the default with respect to the mainstream of society. They are the ones that define what is acceptable, they are the social censors and define what is considered wholesome. The current age of mainstreaming of feminism and political correctness has outlasted the time that reactionaries want to call back in their idealism -- 50's and early 60's. Eventually all the people who lived back then will die out and kids will grow up with absolutely no social context of anything different.
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2mo ago
I decided to weigh in properly first, before I respond to anything below.
I find it incredibly ironic that this topic which deals with a whole host of complex environmental, social, cultural and yes genetic factors that are interlinked is being reduced to what amounts reductive reasoning. The genetic biomarkers that indicate genetic lineage also indicate significant non-genetic differences or environmental and social causes as well. The genetic markers that indicate race also point to factors such as: blood serum lead levels; air quality/pollution exposure; poverty and its associated effects and a complex interplay between sub-cultures and the wider society around them. The argument in a nutshell is: HBD -- they are poor because they are stupid; whereas the mainstream position is that they are stupid because they are poor and discriminated against both presently and historically.
There is considerable evidence demonstrating that fetal exposure to maternal psychosocial experiences contributes to the determination of children’s neurodevelopmental trajectories (Bale et al., 2010). Data generated largely over the last two decades shows that when pregnant women experience significant stress, anxiety, or depression (each of which are frequently indexed by cortisol levels), their children are at increased risk for biobehavioral characteristics conceptualized as potential precursors to psychopathology
Also
The results of the study revealed that children who were living in poverty and whose parents lacked nurturing skills were likely to have less gray and white matter in their brains.
The researchers say that white matter is usually linked to the brain’s ability to transmit signals between cells and structures, while gray matter is associated with intelligence.
The MRI scans also revealed that poor children had two key brain structures that were smaller, compared with wealthier children. These were the amygdala – a structure linked to emotional health – and the hippocampus – an area of the brain linked to memory and learning.
Furthermore, it was found that children in poverty were more likely to experience stressful life events, such as moving house or schools, which can have an impact on brain development.
See: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/268066#Improving-parental-nurturing-skills-vital
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/
The American Black population is simply exposed to a greater level of stress, and this affects them both individually as well as socially within their segregated communities. They are affected both at a personal level and by the effects of this psychopathology on a wider level within their communities as they are exposed to crime at a much higher rate than the rest of the non-Black population. These effects are passed down both through both genetic expression as well as their cultural environment. These factors carry down through multiple generations as unless the environmental causes can be ameliorated, they will persist into future generations as long as the environmental factors that caused it are still present.
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2mo ago
Congratulations, you have won the debate without even having to debate. Now that your opposition seems to have retreated back to their bailey, so you can go and do your victory lap around it.
Seeing as others have pointed out that you're considered to be in the stronger position, as a defense lawyer and podcaster -- could you defend the election stolen viewpoint? That is possibly the only way a debate on this issue is ever going to move forward seeing as so far nobody is game to take up the losing side, but this is the kind of fight you're probably used to undertaking.
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2mo ago
Autism has extremely high overlap within the LGBT community:
Current research indicates that autistic people have higher rates of LGBT identities and feelings than the general population.[1][2][3] A variety of explanations for this have been proposed, such as prenatal hormonal exposure, which has been linked with both sexual orientation, gender dysphoria and autism. Alternatively, autistic people may be less reliant on social norms and thus are more open about their orientation or gender identity. A narrative review published in 2016 stated that while various hypotheses have been proposed for an association between autism and gender dysphoria, they lack strong evidence.[4]
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_and_LGBT_identities
Given the extremely strong overlap between autism and the entirety of the QUILTBAG grouping, I would expect that autism would be the next on the list after or alongside late-stage transgender rights campaigning.
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2mo ago
Why is there a culture war? Because the study and practice of politics is professional, and the culture war creates cheap single-issue voters. Getting cheap votes on auto-lock means that they can spend their resources on their own interests and the interests of important constituents such as the median swing voter. Politicians have gone a long way to ensure that internal party processes are often the only way for them to actually be unseated from their positions, so it vests power within the party infrastructure itself and takes away power from the people they are meant to represent.
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2mo ago
It seems incredibly incompetent for Trump to allege voter fraud and then do seemingly nothing to counter it in the four years he held office. What can you really say? It was there, he saw it, and he was too useless to do anything about it? If it was a true claim, then the most motivated person in the world to deal with it would be Trump himself or his closest advisors.
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2mo ago
I don't have time for this right now, but I'll leave my flag in the sand and say HBD is wrong. I'll just leave this quote here I found on reddit that does the same job as me taking the time:
Human biodiversity is actually pretty low - Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks and when compared to other species, such as our closest relatives like chimpanzees, we'd look like inbreeds.
Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn't die out. This is known as the Identical Ancestors Point (google it) and it's pretty uncontroversial if unintuitive. You can easily derive it by reasoning the other way around: simply put, the probability that anyone lived 7000 years ago and wasn't one of your ancestors given the amount of potential ancestors you'd be supposed to have (which is 27000/generation time) is low enough to be considered negligible. And 7000 years ago is a pretty conservative estimate.
Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates "Africans" from other groups is going to be suspect.
Race isn't a valid construct, genetically speaking. It's not well defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond Blacks/Whites/Asians. Most of the definitions are based on self reports or continents of origin, when we know what is considered "black" in the US may not be so in, say, Brazil, or that many people from Africa can very well be considered "white". Of course most HBD proponents are from the US and are hardly aware of other countries' existence apart from their national IQ so they just handwave it away.
Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There's no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been struggling with "general AI" for the better part of a century)
IQ has a number of flaws that would make anyone outside the field of psychology not touch it with a ten foot pole. For starters, it is by definition Gaussian for no apparent reason. The g construct itself has no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.
Evolution isn't just mutations + natural selection. To assume that diversity just arose from different populations adapting to different environments is already a pretty huge assumption that none of the HBD proponents cares to back up. Not every trait is an adaptation.
There's no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to account for traits purported to be "genetic" in origin by HBD proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms. Epistasis alone fucks up many behavioral genetics models and this is just scratching the surface of the complexity involved.
Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the foetus). That's not even addressing the environmental confounding factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like "uuuh you don't need to find genes for something to be grounded in genetics".
Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is virtually unknown in the genomics community. They are known to make up their own journals (from Mankind Quarterly to OpenPsych) so they can publish in them instead of trying to get accepted in mainstream ones. "Everyone is in a conspiracy against me" only goes so far as an argument. On the other hand, literally every public figure in the genomics community has spoken against HBD. Generally speaking, HBD proponents are unqualified. Their understanding of genetics and evolution does not go beyond high school, none of them hold a degree in a discipline relevant to genetics and none of them has ever published in a high profile journal. (I'm going to be charitable and assume that high profile means IF > 4). HBD proponents are more interested in shitposting on the internet than publishing genetics papers and going to conferences.
Literally anyone who's been working on HBD stuff has been receiving funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the 1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.
Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighbouring countries' IQ in order to derive "data" from a country's unknown national IQ. HBD proponents actually doubled down on this practice. People like Rushton would attempt to transpose pleiotropy mechanisms from some species to humans, despite the explicit insistence that such mechanisms were not adaptable because the genetics behind skin colors in humans are completely different from that of species governed by pleiotropy. Other people like Kanazawa would write a paper literally assuming the Earth was flat, and it was accepted in a "high profile" journal like Intelligence in three weeks.
Each one of those should be a debunking, but of course HBD proponents don't really care about any of those; as I said, none of them has ever been really involved in the actual scientific community. The whole point is to give an appearance of scholarship under the guise of clever sounding citations and lengthy papers, nevermind that those are in bogus journals from fields that are virtually unknown of the broader genomics community.
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3mo ago
That has been my sense as an outsider from New Zealand comparing our own indigenous politics to American. It seems that the well meaning attempts have done more to 'erase' the culture than to protect it. Overall the welfare of indigenous Americans seems to have been pretty well ignored by the mainstream liberal/progressive left whilst at the same time they have spent the majority of their attention on the plight of African Americans.
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2mo ago
I'll bite: The 2020 election was 'stolen' in the same way that the 2016 election was 'stolen'; or in other words the election was basically business as usual for United States politics and future elections are going to be equally 'stolen' as long as the current status-quo remains.
Bing Copilot -- Disputed Results:
In both elections, there were allegations that the results were unfair or rigged. Supporters of the losing candidate claimed that the election outcome did not accurately reflect the will of the people.
External Influence: Foreign interference played a role in both elections: In 2016, there was evidence of Russian meddling, including hacking and disinformation campaigns. In 2020, concerns arose about foreign interference, although the focus shifted to other countries as well (not just Russia).
Legal Challenges: After both elections, legal challenges were filed: In 2016, some lawsuits questioned the legitimacy of the Electoral College process and voting restrictions. In 2020, numerous lawsuits were filed by supporters of the losing candidate, alleging widespread voter fraud and irregularities.
Public Perception: A significant portion of the American population believed that the elections were stolen: In 2016, some Democrats questioned the legitimacy due to external factors. In 2020, approximately 40% of Americans believed the election was rigged or stolen, with claims of fraudulent vote counting.
Impact on Trust: Both elections had repercussions on public trust in the democratic process: Claims of election theft can erode confidence in the system. Open dialogue and transparency are crucial to maintaining trust.
In both instances there are strong cases to be made that motivated actors on both a smaller scale and a larger scale tipped the balance in favour of their desired outcome. Whilst the degree of interference and dirty politics was high by United States standards, the practice of dirty politics has been ongoing for decades at this point, so it represents an increase in an already increasing trend. Given the even greater stakes in the upcoming election to many foreign powers, as well as domestic reversals such as Roe V Wade due to the Supreme Court, all interested parties in the election are likely to have even greater motivation to influence the results by whatever means necessary.
Looking more broadly at the future, the current polls seem to indicate a status-quo election for Congress at 204 vs 207, with 24 seats being 'toss ups' at this point: https://www.270towin.com/2024-house-election/
The issue with your question in general is that if you apply a broader definition to the term 'stolen' then it becomes a both sides issues; and if you apply a narrower definition with respect to whether particular constitutional or electoral laws were broken, that argument simply hasn't borne fruit despite numerous challenges. With a broad definition, what kind of argument can be made that doesn't come down to 'their side stole the election more than my side', and with a narrow definition the argument is already settled.
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2mo ago
The biggest issue with Libertarianism actually wielding power is that they cannot control the keys to power in a society. Any attempt by them to actually wield the keys to power leads to dilution of the ideals of the ideology itself, as by its very nature it is about minimising the cost of government and therefore the 'treasure' that anyone in power can use to bring others to their side. Conversely, the stronger and more powerful government already is, the greater the number of people that would be actively opposed to the ideology as they stand to lose considerable power and wealth in that kind of power transition.
Socialism has the Soviet problem along with being unable to counter the efficient market theory of economics; but Libertarianism has the Somalia social problems and 'freedom', also bears. The issue with an unregulated society in general is that it becomes extremely difficult to deal with bad actors of all types, a kind of societal distributed gish gallop, whereby what 'can be done in civil society' is overwhelmed by the outcomes already burnt into institutional memory like so many Chesterton's fences. We not remember lead laced tin cans, and snake oil salesmen, but I'm sure the FDA hasn't forgotten the reason for its existence.
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4mo ago
One of the most significant differences between men and women is that women appear to able to be significantly more content and happy outside of relationships and are better able to have fulfilling platonic relationships; whereas men are both less happier and purposeful, and suffer far greater loneliness and isolation from being single. Men as a whole have not evolved culturally to the new playing field, and women are often preferring to be in no relationship than be in a bad relationship -- bad sex, more chores and less freedom. We can argue absolutely that society as a whole has left boys behind in so many ways; but the solutions proposed by the online right are more like willful regression than a genuine means to fix things.
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2mo ago
Y'all know I love my hobby horse, even if it's beaten into an absolute paste, and I admit at having ongoing puzzlement as to why 2020 stolen election claims retain so much cachet among republican voters and officials.
It is because they are unified in their collective belief in sacred beliefs in opposition to facts and logic. It's like a social acid trip, people who cannot believe in the world around them clustering around sacred beliefs and the rejection of a crazy reality that they cannot accept. They want someone to tell them that no they aren't crazy, it's the other side that is truly crazy and that they are the sane ones. They go through the motions, maybe they enjoy some good 'belief theatre' whereby they can see a sick person wheeled on stage and then 'healed' to walk off it again; but when they get sick they usally don't rely on merely prayer as they take full advantage of advanced medical science instead.
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2mo ago
Likewise, the US public at large has been brainwashed by decades of Hollywood action girlbosses, and nothing but. I honestly believe this is where all the confusion about men playing in women's sports is coming from. Forget all the scientific facts about male puberty changes versus female puberty changes, and documented physical advantages in nearly every measurable physical attribute, be it strength, reaction time, depth perception, you name it. Forget the fact that every 4 years in the Olympics you see the men's divisions regularly annihilate the women's divisions if you compared them apples to apples. 30 years of Hollywood girlboss action movies renders all that moot in the minds of most. The Olympics doesn't have a badass soundtrack, and dozens of camera angles edited together with just the right amount of CGI to saturate your brain in dopamine. So most people in their heart of hearts believe women can easily beat up men, or that men might be a little stronger.
You mean in a medium where: people have fantastical powers; get up after taking ridiculous beatings; fights that are choreographed in the heroes favour, women can be given unrealistic advantages? Yes. Is it part of a concerted effort? Yes it is; just the same as how media was criticised and influenced under previous cultural censorship. Even under that previous censorship, it came out through pushing women into roles and different ethnicities into new roles and criticising it when done badly. The status-quo has been feminism and women's equality for a few decades now. We got Black presidents in movies, many many times, before we saw Obama became president, and a woman president is just a matter of time now as well. A group of people thought that society would be better if women were more equal and ethnicities like Black Americans can have equal rights and opportunities with the rest of the population, and influence on the media was an important tool in making that happen.
I made this point before, but I think people truly underestimate how utterly brainwashed people can be by media.
As a non-culture war example that I've given before, I play a game called Commands & Colors: Ancients. It's a tactical dudes on a map game that has a bunch of Roman battles you can simulate. And it has cavalry. But these aren't armored knights, they are just dudes on horses. They are squishy, don't hit that hard, and mostly only useful for flanking or chasing down weakened units. If you try to form a wedge with them and ride right into the enemy's center with them like you see in movies, they will all die, and you will lose. Badly.
The ironic part of the cultural control is that we project present values back into depictions of the past as well. It leads people to think that people in the past behaved within current cultural frameworks. This seems to create a perception erasor for the people in the present whose main context with the past is through that same media. Most people only really understand concepts like ancient rome through the lens of movies and television shows, maybe a few documentaries if they are more inclined. Shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation were epically popular at the time, but the values explicit to that show are normalised for today's audience. The same perception that caused the opponents to run their 'knights' head first into your troops is the same impulse that sees women as being equal by default. The sad part though is that with the abundance of dopamine hits, in our 'brave new world', people can pick the drug of their choice, or their entire perspective of how the world is.
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2mo ago
We are in a golden age of biological research, CRISPR for instance is an incredible tool because it lets scientists/technicians cut the genetic code at an exact point. Furthermore, we are also at the point where our knowledge of genetic determinism is going to increase exponentially as this is literally one of the best use cases for machine learning -- multivariate analysis on extremely large datasets. We will be able to analyse not only the effect of genes, but also the interaction between different genes over the whole organism and compare that to other combined genotypes.
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2mo ago
I wish my comment on this topic hadn't been nixed by the reset, but anyhow in brief:
expect deflections about multiple intelligences or street smarts here. Doesn't withstand much scrutiny but is still more a more poplar stance than you'd expect.
Well, it does apply; however, the coalition on the left are heavily into a one size fits all approach -- higher education -- due to their own deep investment within the educational establishment or having been a product of it. The professional management class (PMC) simply does not respect anyone without a higher education, nor do they respect blue collar vocations or vocational education. Immigration isn't a big deal for people who have jobs with high cultural context (much of the PMC/white collar workforce) and they have significant barriers to entry to their professions. On the other hand, unrestricted migration and the closing of many blue-collar workplaces along with the heavy restrictions on development in heavy blue coded states means that there are narrow windows in both aptitude and time for a young 'disadvantaged' person to potentially rise up and get away from grinding poverty should they have been unfortunate enough to be born into it. All that extra money being poured into education (administration bloat) is essentially a blue coded jobs program with exceedingly little to show for it in terms of ameliorating poverty and hardship.
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2mo ago
The effects of epigenitics, microbiota, and environmental cells are just quite small. The evidence just isn't there. Environmental confounding is very well addressed by existing studies. "lack of an actual genetic explanation" - again, complex traits are extremely polygenic.
Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.
There are significant and obvious causal factors, like for instance lead exposure:
Overall, Black children had an adjusted +0.83 µg/dL blood Pb (95% CI 0.65 to 1.00, p < 0.001) and a 2.8 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (95% CI 1.9 to 3.9, p < 0.001). When stratified by risk factor group, Black children had an adjusted 0.73 to 1.41 µg/dL more blood Pb (p < 0.001 respectively) and a 1.8 to 5.6 times higher odds of having an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL (p ≤ 0.05 respectively) for every selected risk factor that was tested. For Black children nationwide, one in four residing in pre-1950 housing and one in six living in poverty presented with an EBLL ≥5 µg/dL. In conclusion, significant nationwide racial disparity in blood Pb outcomes persist for predominantly African-American Black children even after correcting for risk factors and other variables.
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7084658/
And how exactly do they account for the elements that are not well studied? Like for instance volatile organic compounds in the air and poorer air circulation/higher CO2 levels at home? Being poor puts people closer to environmental contaminants that have large and well-known effects on the overall intelligence of people.
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5mo ago
80% of the difference is pornography in my opinion, and briefly: Dopamine/addiction effects mean they don't seek it out and perform badly when they get it; they get bad ideas from porn which affects their partners and these are sexual mores that used to be considered 'out there' such as choking/anal/facials/etc; masturbation aids being normalised for women mean they are often happier by themselves than with a partner and finally this all compounds because it causes women to raise their standards whilst many men fall through the floor.
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2mo ago
What do you believe are my motte and bailey positions on this topic?
The election fraud issue is vapid because taking a deep dive into what amounts to propaganda is an exercise in frustration. The claims serve the purpose of riling up his base support, and to shore up his power; given the vast number of them they act as a shotgun approach for his supporters to find one particular claim compelling.
Your motte: All claims are at best specious and at worst groundless. Your bailey: Insufficient evidence exists that has survived testing by the court system and all attempts have failed, there is simply insufficient evidence to make the claim that the election was stolen -- I'm not so sure on your fall back position to be honest as the motte here is so strong that it would be hard to imagine ever having to fall back to the bailey.
I thought about this issue while I was at the gym, and the most plausible take that fits the evidence or lack-thereof would be internal government agencies such as the CIA. I'm looking at this issue through the lens of The Dictator's Handbook, which you can get 90% understanding through watching this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&ab_channel=CGPGrey
If the Democratic party had a concrete means to steal elections, or an 'auto win' button, then I cannot see them not pressing it every single time as they have already worked themselves up into a rhetorical fervor that their opposition is evil and cannot be allowed control of the government. On the other hand, the only institution with the knowledge, wherewithal and motivation to steal an election would be the CIA as they already have considerable experience in doing this exact thing in overseas countries, the list of governments overthrown or rumoured to have been overthrown by the CIA is quite frankly staggering. The CIA has literally had one main job over the past 75 years that it has been around, dunk on the Russians, and it would be hard for them to let that go -- especially given the alleged ties between Trump and Russia. The sheer amount of useless chatter can be explained away by one of two possible scenarios: either propaganda, as I suspect, or a successful intelligence operation flooding the information space with useless junk.
Biden came to the White House with a long history of receiving intelligence briefings, having served eight years as vice president and 36 years as a senator from Delaware, where he led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served on the Intelligence Committee when it was first created in the 1970s. The thing he missed most after leaving the vice presidency, he said, was reading the President’s Daily Brief, the compilation of the intelligence community’s top collection and analysis.
Joe Biden has had considerable ties to the CIA through his long career in office, and during this term he has increased the funding and elevated the status of the agency within the United States government by for instance elevating the director of the CIA to his cabinet. See: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/21/politics/bill-burns-cia-director-cabinet-level/index.html . Biden would have the necessary ties to coordinate the effort with the CIA and I believe the CIA could have been motivated to help him, especially given accusations publicly for instance that Trump compromised several agents with his intelligence leaks, along with a number of other OPSec issues as well. One the other hand, Biden has given greater 'treasure' and power to the agency over the past few years; whereas the Republican party has developed a spottier relationship with the agency ever since the second gulf war; finally, the 'drain the swamp' rhetoric is a direct challenge to the institutional members of the government.
Unfortunately, there is no real evidence and at best it is 'evidence of absence'. I am picking on the CIA as a potential conspirator simply because they are the only agency that could pull this kind of mission off and then get away clean. They have a potential motive to act due to their seemingly poor relationship with Trump; the means to act because of their close relationship with Biden as well as their institutional know-how in the spheres of dis/misinformation and election tampering, and finally they have recieved rewards from the Biden administration with considerable additional funding going their way. This is heading down the road of 'conspiracy theory', but the agency deemed responsible to prevent foreign interference in the election is likely the best placed agency to tamper with the election themselves. The necessary number of potential guilty parties is quite small and well contained given only a few top level people need to know the full extent of a 'possible conspiracy', and the rest of the agency has little motivation to offer help to Trump who has shown disdain for them and has actively hurt their operations.
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4mo ago
One of the major reasons for progressives to take up both causes is due to resource constraints. As an Indian you'd surely have to acknowledge the relative unsustainability of 1.3 Billion Indians living anything remotely like a westerners lifestyle. It simply cannot scale up, and India lacks the ability to take resources from distant parts of the globe to sustain its lifestyle. Even in the West, we have a stark choice between living a relatively resource constrained lifesytyle that would still make the average Indian person jealous; which unfortunately would be considered an affront on the non-negotiability of the American way of life. It's the inconvenient truth, our lifestyles are unsustainable and we are approaching multiple eco-system limits with a blissful disregard for the sheer terror we might have unleashed upon ourselves. We can culture war all day every day about the relative decline of our own lifestyles and who is truly to blame for that, but relative lifestyle adjustments for us are an inconvenience; whereas in the third world they carry a body count.
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4mo ago
I think the difference is made by the 'fact' that people like their hedonistic overlords more than their puritanical peers. Moral righteousness and asceticism just don't quite hit the same as a cheese burger, fries and a beer. It's for this reason that the arguments themselves are immaterial, because the decisions are not made on a logical level. The basic argument is the same <You would be uncomfortable if you understood / saw X, Y, Z> vs <I don't want to know> and this kind of sums up the basic left vs right argument. The right understands and responds to the limbic systems of their 'clients' to the benefit of their overlords; whereas the left faces an uphill battle pretty much everywhere outside of professional or academic contexts.
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2mo ago
Sorry, I won't do that again.
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5mo ago
It's ironic on so many levels. Two groups of socialists, both alike in 'dignity', trying to promote an ideology created by and associated with Jewish people to an anti-Semitic Islamic audience.
Israel itself is a pan-Arabic failure and a symbol of the collective helplessness of the Arab world. We own their leaders and their leaders use this issue to own and control them. We prop up dictators because they are cheap and easy to pay off, and they use whatever tactics are required to ensure we get what we want in return. The reason why they get a pass with the 'Professional/Management class' (PMC) is that it is assumed that we are on an 'auto-win' trajectory. Either they become secularised, educated (westernised) and tolerant; or their entire civilization will collapse into the sand that it emerged from and the remaining muslims will be 'managed' until they are no longer problematic. Unironically I see the way the Left as a coalition treats Islam as irrelevant is more shameful than the rightwing outright hate and mistrust.
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3mo ago
Is the purpose of welfare to support the deserving poor (like those born with disabilities through no fault of their own, widows raising children, and perhaps the elderly who never made enough to save for retirement), or is it to provide a minimum standard of living for everyone, no matter how objectionable?
Society has a level of structural unemployment of around 5%, so from a pragmatic perspective if society is designed in such a way that by design a large number of people are going to be structurally without jobs they should also not risk starving to death in the process? If some degree of unemployment is desirable then ensuring the people who are made unemployed don't starve to death in the process just kind of makes sense.
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3mo ago
The left thinks systemically and the right thinks individually or on a personal level. Concepts like 'privilege' tend to fall apart when applied on an individual basis because people on an individual level are much more complex and nuanced than some B level student's take on theories that they don't understand. On the other hand you cannot scale what an individual can achieve to a systemic level analysis of society as a whole, so whilst some people can achieve great things, it cannot account for the structural element that skews the 'playing field'.
Calling it jealousy creates a straw man argument in my opinion, because much of the left-wing side that you likely don't hear about rests on very different arguments. Only a fraction of a fraction of even the most progressive people are what could be described as hardcore 'intersectionalists'. One of the most significant differences between a democracy and a dictatorship is that a democracy is accountable to a wider range of stakeholders, so their personal and economic interests must be taken into consideration and that overall leads to a more prosperous society. Wealth inequality and power concentration damanges democracy, so by extension it makes society as a whole less prosperous even if certain individuals in that society can become incredibly wealthy within it.
Simple answer: People driving bigger trucks and giving even fewer fucks.
Longer answer:
Pedestrian deaths are up by thousands and:
See: read://https_www.wired.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fpedestrian-death-rates-climb%2F
Also statistically,
Caused by:
See: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813266
Basically, people driving faster, more impaired and fewer people wearing seat belts.
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