381–390 of 474 posts
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> It doesn’t matter how blue you die your hair If your intention is honest engagement with people you disagree with, you should refrain from ad-hominem attacks like this. Work with their arguments, not with their tastes or appearances. If your intention is to ridicule them and convince yourself they are not worth discussing with, then ad-hominem is fine, but not engaging at all is better.
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> It feels like this collective insanity will never end They simply do not believe that the consequences will be as bad as the models predict. And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc. As a strategic decision, we have taken our eye off the ball, climate…
The attention to those fringe issues is brought by those conservatives and lobbyists etc who explicitly want to distract and divide attention from climate change and renewables. It's strongly my opinion that there are far fewer people championing 'wokeness' than there are 'getting outraged by it's pervasiveness'. Mainly for the fact that all media like to seize upon controversy, thus turning minor fringe issues into…
Being transgender wasn't some sort of political football 10 years ago even though 10 years ago basically everything that was happening WRT trans individuals that made the pearl clutchers clutch pearls was happening then and earlier.
The only reason "the left" started caring about trans individuals is because right wing reactionaries decided that it was the source of all the ills of the world. It was a pretty natural "no it's not, you guys are being insane". Especially because as a result to the right losing it's mind over trans individuals, we are seeing all sorts of insane over reactions in the law (In idaho, they are passing a law with a 5 year prison sentence for a trans individual taking a shit in a public bathroom).
This is basically how the cycle goes. The right targets a minority, the left defends the minority, the media capitalizes on the "both sides" of it all at the exclusion of talking about things like taxing rich people, funding public services, or addressing climate change.
The only time I've seen the reverse was BLM, but it's pretty much the same outcome.
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> for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose Ugh, I'm going to regret commenting here, but it really seems like this obsession is almost entirely on the right wing. In the US, the centrist Dems have been banging the appeasement drum for my entire political life, and it's gotten us nowhere. Like... the right isn't going to wake up and start caring about climate change if eve…
> In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed? I think you're sort of proving the parent's point - when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person? Trans rights ain't even that popular; most people are okay with "you th…
This is a thing that basically does not exist. This is, again, more right-wing culture war bullshit that was cooked up in a meth lab. It's not real.
Can you get fired if you purposefully antagonize your boss at work? Yes. That's always been the case. Guess what, if I call my boss a jackass I'm probably getting shown the door, and that's not even a pronoun.
Can you get in trouble for discriminating based on gender and sexual orientation? Yes, and that's been the case for a while.
Nobody is getting into legal trouble because they don't personally believe trans women aren't "real" women, whatever "real" might mean to them. Nobody, not a soul. It's just a non-issue.
What's going on is there is a set of people who are basically just doing nothing who are under constant new and innovative threats from the right. And, when they say, "hey, don't do that", we somehow have the gall to point at them and yell "Culture war! Culture war!"
It's not that people's goodwill is being burnt on trans people. It's that the right has been playing to the populist messaging they have in order to continue their crusade.
While the economy is burning down, and the climate is worsening, and we are entering wars, they are trying to convince you the problem is some set of people who are doing nothing. And, that the solution is simple: beat down this set of people.
This includes immigrants, trans people, gay people. Of course, it's just not true. But humans are stupid. We're already pre-wired to be uneasy around people we don't understand who are different from us, especially visibly different. And, humans understand and have high confidence in simple solutions.
I mean, God, look at the border wall. Will that work? Did that work? Of course not. But it's such a simple, almost child-like understanding of the problem that people had very high confidence in it.
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> It feels like this collective insanity will never end They simply do not believe that the consequences will be as bad as the models predict. And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc. As a strategic decision, we have taken our eye off the ball, climate…
Kamala Harris started out with a surge of popularity. Talking about corporate price gouging and selecting Tim Walz as her running mate who had clear populist messaging. Then the strategists who think like you got in her ear. Told her to stop attacking corporations to protect donations. Had her campaign with Cheney and talk about shooting home invaders. Then of course she refused to take a strong stand on the genocide…
Had she not campaigned towards conservative voters, I think she could have won. Really strong campaign positions like medicare for all or taxing the rich have pretty broad appeal. Heck, she even could have campaigned on abortion access and rights and that would have been pretty decent. She didn't need to touch or address immigration. And her "no tax on tips, me too" thing was just embarrassing.
Gaza was a major issue, and a major misstep of hers was to say that none of her policies would be different from Biden's. Even if that were true, she had a whole lot of popular policies and positions from Biden's cabinet she could have ran on (like breaking up monopolies).
She ditched all of that to run like you said and it absolutely crushed the giant boost she got from Biden stepping down and Walz calling Vance a weirdo.
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This is completely contrary to reality. Iran is a missile and rocketry superpower. They've launched a lot of stuff, some of which got through.
There’s a number of videos of US and Israeli air defense quite literally failing at intercepts. You can see the entire trajectories and stuff. Some from US bases, other in Israel but they are trying to censor them.
For intercepts - there are absolute tons of AI videos out there. I wouldn't trust anything unless it's from reputable OSINT channel.
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> I think most people expected Trump Two to be a similar shit show to Trump One While they were being warned that his team spent 4 years planning on how to get rid of anyone who pushed back, and he wouldn't be hamstrung this time. The people who thought 2.0 would be like 1.0 were simply choosing to beleive it despite all of the evidence suggesting otherwise.
How is 2.0 not like 1.0? Impounding government funds, check. Using CBP (ICE) against US citizens, check. Assassinating Iranian officials, check. Tariffs, check.
The thing is, it was really bad the first time. We got through in spite of the incredibly dogshit fiscal policy and foreign affairs. So, if you do that again but go 10x further... will we make it through? Dunno.
If anything, the first Trump term proved to me the resiliency of the US political and economic structures. Even in the face of an absolute lunatic with an almost religious drive to destroy everything, we prevailed. Of course, little did we know that was just the beginning. Do we have the endurance? We'll see!
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In this regard, the subreddit r/NeutralPolitics is interesting: it aims at evidence-based discussions on political issues. Threads are somehow in-between HN and Wikipedia. It is definitely interesting to read, and at the same time, participating in a discussion is quite daunting.
I agree with the recommendation. Link: https://reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics And its sister sub NeutralNews for news article discussion (same rules): https://reddit.com/r/NeutralNews Both subs allow users to submit new posts and comments (but spend 2 minutes checking out the rules first).
However, on every thread I checked, about 70% of comments are deleted. That means that the noise is still there, but the mods are having to work nonstop to fight it and no doubt introducing their own bias as they do so.
I wish them luck and I'll keep checking these places out but I can't help but feel that by the time you're deleting 70% of all comments (and who knows what percentage of threads), you're fighting a losing battle.
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> In my state, we removed protections for housing and employment discrimination against trans people because... one trans athlete existed? I think you're sort of proving the parent's point - when you're in an existential fight, is it really that important that you use the limited attention of the public to fight for the rights of a single person? Trans rights ain't even that popular; most people are okay with "you th…
> "It must be a crime if you don't treat me as a member of the opposite sex". This is a thing that basically does not exist. This is, again, more right-wing culture war bullshit that was cooked up in a meth lab. It's not real. Can you get fired if you purposefully antagonize your boss at work? Yes. That's always been the case. Guess what, if I call my boss a jackass I'm probably getting shown the door, and that's not…
Trans people haven't done nothing, there are many reforms that have moved the trans issue a lot that were pushed by trans people, that is not nothing. The right isn't innovating anything by rolling back those, they are just being conservative which is in their name.
You could argue those reforms are good, but you can't argue it is the right that is changing things here, the right just undo change they don't do the changing on these issues.
And you can't fault the right for trying to win the election. You have to try to win the election as well, throwing it away by sticking to unpopular policies such as trans in sports is just ignorant. It isn't just the right that doesn't want trans in sports, it is a large majority of the entire population that doesn't want that.
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But US mostly wins from global warming relatively, right? I mean, it's going to suffer less than others (except EU), for geographical reasons, thus winning. I don't think global warming is a concern for US at all (some places sure, Florida will be royally fucked, but not most places).
This seems like soft trolling. Global warming is canonically the opposite of a zero sum game. Everyone is losing.
No not everyone loses, people in colder climates win a lot from global warming, especially Russia and Canada. There is so much land there that is currently not viable due to being too cold that will open up from global warming.