631–640 of 675 posts
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Why not just "genital mutilation"? You don't have to be that specific about it as if there were some acceptable cases of it.
Society does not care as much about males?
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Pointing out a single pro legalization politician does not invalidate the claim that conservatives are more opposed to drug legalization than liberals. Look at any poll out there.
>Look at any poll out there. I don't trust polls. Dehumanizing people into numbers is pointless. People are not numbers, and the elections showed how worthless they are. During Obama there were raids on dispensaries. These labels are meaningless. We are not liberal or conservative. We are people with many different often hypocritical viewpoints, nobody is consistent. Nixon’s universal healthcare would have been more…
Polls like any statistical sample are not perfect but they aren't worthless. https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-... Also polling people isn't dehumanizing them.
83% of Democrats support legalization vs 48% of Republicans. These margins are too great to be explained away by poor polling.
So again if Conservatives were actually about less government control then they wouldn't support the government making marijuana illegal.
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Society does not care as much about males?
Just because "society" is doing something doesn't mean that you have to. Society lies, steals, murders, rapes, but I don't have to.
This reminds me of CEO-speak. A CEO cannot speak their true mind or their true assessment of a situation. They can't say "wow we're in trouble here" because then people will jump ship and then the company will be even more in trouble (and the CEO would get sued for breaching Fiduciary Duty) What a CEO says is merely wishful thinking for a goal they want people to follow. They can never speak their true plan. (And of…
In order to achieve the same desired effect for all recipients, the words have to be crafted very carefully and certain things are being described in ways that might look very different in retrospect. Sometimes you even have to lie, but if you are good, you can avoid that.
Politicians do this non-stop.
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According to the Mayo Clinic[1] 72.2% of the US population already have at least one dose. Presumably the people with one dose will continue to get the second one. Among the people who aren't vaccinated, some of them will have already had it and have a natural immunity. Some of them will get the vaccine eventually even without a mandate. So, there's some number Only a small percentage of cases require hospitalization…
> So, there's some number In Wyoming, 80%. I just picked two states at either end, you see similar pattern for other states. The highly politicized nature of the vaccine also means that some people that should get the vaccine, and normally would, are holding out. This is disservice to everyone. I have extended family members where people have died because an immune-compromised person didnt get the vax because their c…
WY has 576,851 people. MA has 7,033,469. So, at 50% and 80% vaccinated, there are 288,426 unvaccinated people in WY and 1,406,694 in MA.
WY is also nearly 10x larger at 97,914 sq mi. vs. 10,565 sq mi. in MA. So, in MA there are ~133 unvaccinated people per sq mi and a little less than 3 per sq mi. in WY.
If you want to minimize your chances of encountering an unvaccinated person, your odds are much much better in WY, despite the percentages! It's misleading to talk about percentages when the absolute numbers are so different.
Also, think about a rancher living on 1,000 acre ranch in WY who spends most of their time outdoors chasing cattle (and is in great shape) and goes into town for groceries every other week vs. a sedentary office worker in MA who takes the T into downtown Boston every day. Very different risk profiles for catching Covid and having a serious case. You're not gaining a whole lot by forcing the rancher to get vaccinated.
> The highly politicized nature of the vaccine also means that some people that should get the vaccine, and normally would, are holding out.
And who politicized it? Who wrote articles comparing the percentages of "Red State" vaccinations vs. "Blue State" vaccinations? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't the people in the Red States. Now the vaccine is tied in to people's identities. Now getting the vaccine is a "liberal thing" so now people are forced to go against their tribe to get the vaccine. Sure, I guess it helps you score political points with your in-group and get lots of likes on Twitter when you can dunk on the dumb conservatives who won't get vaccinated, but it is literally killing people. The mandates are not about saving lives, they're about having a political cudgel to make one party look good and the other look bad. People are getting vaccinated anyway, they would be getting vaccinated faster and with less resistance if one party were not trying to use it is a ploy to appear sanctimonious.
As a bit of anecdata, both of my parents are conservative Republicans. My dad especially is an ardent Trump supporter. They both got vaccinated the second it was available to them and got the booster as soon as that was available. So, it's not even an accurate characterization. The vaccine was developed under Trump (although back then, it was Biden, Harris, and the rest of the Democratic party who were pushing vaccine hesitancy). There was an opportunity to paint this as a bipartisan triumph that could have brought people together, but that wasn't allowed to happen.
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> "Women didn't insist all at once on changing everything" Are you sure about that? I think they felt quite strongly about their cause "The suffragettes had invented the letter bomb, a device intended to kill or injure the recipient, and an increasing amount began to be posted... the former home of MP Arthur Du Cros was burned down. Du Cros had consistently voted against the enfranchisement of women, which was why he…
Women’s rights historically aligned well with gdp/capita growth.
How much of this is simply a consequence of the fact that if you take care of your kids, it is not counted as a part of GDP, but if you pay someone else to take care of your kids, it is a part of GDP. So the GDP would increase even if the kids get exactly the same care, and even if all the money the woman makes is spent on paying the babysitters.
The man makes $1000, the woman stays at home with kids = GDP $1000.
The man makes $1000, the woman makes $1000, they pay $1000 for babysitting = GDP $2000.
In the latter scenario, GDP is twice as high, but the family only keeps $1000 either way.
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>Look at any poll out there. I don't trust polls. Dehumanizing people into numbers is pointless. People are not numbers, and the elections showed how worthless they are. During Obama there were raids on dispensaries. These labels are meaningless. We are not liberal or conservative. We are people with many different often hypocritical viewpoints, nobody is consistent. Nixon’s universal healthcare would have been more…
If labels are meaningless then why claim that conservatism is about less government control? Polls like any statistical sample are not perfect but they aren't worthless. https://news.gallup.com/poll/323582/support-legal-marijuana-... Also polling people isn't dehumanizing them. 83% of Democrats support legalization vs 48% of Republicans. These margins are too great to be explained away by poor polling. So again if Co…
Republican and Democrats are not conservative or liberal.
Example: Nancy Pelosi banned ecigs to protect the children, does that mean that she is conservative?
Clinton defunded welfare, was racist, and also deregulated the market. Is he conservative?
Trump mentioned he would like to deregulate all drugs. Does that make him liberal?
Obama raided on dispensaries for federal reason, does that mean he is conservative, or does that mean he is liberal for strong central government?
I mention these heads because the polls don't matter, the policy makers do. The politicians do not work for the people, they are not beholden to their promises or any morals. Does it matter that a bunch of people want weed to be legal and have no way to make it legal, or does one person who can sign it into law matter more? I know my answer, hundreds of my pot smoking friends have less power than one politician.
>Polls like any statistical sample are not perfect but they aren't worthless.
Lets look at the example of "Political ideology"
How do you quantify that? If I consider myself liberal, I am liberal? If I consider myself conservative, I am conservative? These are not concrete definitions. I don't vote downballot. People are hypocritical. What value does this poll give to anyone? What use will it have? What can anyone use it for? When Trump ignored polls he won. When Florida was a bellwether, it is not anymore. I don't see any use in them at all.
Would you call Schwarzenegger a liberal despite him being Republican? Do moderate Democrats share the same value as the ones that are openly communist? Do fundamental christians, libertarians, tea party members, and Trump's MAGA cult of personality really deserve to be lumped together? They are all hypocrites like all humans. I edited my comment, I care about values, not parties and neither party is either or.
I hate politics usually, but I hope my point is clear: I see conservatism as devolution and and I am happy Oregon is deregulating all drugs, there are more democrats than republicans, many unaffiliated with either and they are not letting central government push them around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Oregon
In another thread I mentioned how Bob Dole's achievements are very left wing. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/us/politics/bob-dole-dead...
>He was most proud of helping to rescue Social Security in 1983, of pushing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and of mustering a majority of reluctant Republicans to support Mr. Clinton’s unpopular plan to send American troops to Bosnia in 1995.
>Russell Republicans approached Mr. Dole in 1950 to run for the Kansas State Legislature — they saw the hometown war hero as an easy sell. But he had not yet picked a party, though his parents were New Deal Democrats. He said later that he had signed on with the Republicans after he was told that that’s what most Kansas voters were.
also:
>It was a surprising turn for Mr. Dole, who was long linked in the public mind with the glowering Nixon. He had defended that beleaguered president so fiercely that one critic branded him Nixon’s “hatchet man,” a label that stuck.
Lets not focus on labels, and lets focus on policy, and remember nobody follows the rules, especially politicians.
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Your rosy view of the historical consequences of the French Revolution is, to say the least, questionable. I would say the main historical consequence of the French Revolution has been a lot of other revolutions which had even more tragic consequences (up to and including the ones in the 20th century that led to more than a hundred million deaths), while rosy language about "liberation" and "democracy" kept people fr…
The revolution itself was absolutely brutal, but overall had a positive effect on all kinds of emancipation. While it ended in Napoleon, this cannot only be attributed to the revolution itself which basically ended serfdom in France and no monarch could bring that back. Today we take for granted that a government is a servant to the populous and not the other way around, but it was the revolution that popularized tha…
You must be joking. Even ostensibly democratic governments have no problem at all treating the people as subjects instead of as masters.
> That you had insane murderers rising to the top was a side effect. Expecting the end of monarchy to not spill blood is also a pretty rosy perspective.
There are lots of ways to end a monarchy which, while they are not bloodless, do not involve insane murderers rising to the top. But the fact that insane murderers did rise to the top in the French Revolution was not a "side effect"; it was an obvious consequence of the way that revolution was done, dictated from the top down by a small group of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason".
> You have to compare the dead to those that die under monarchist and totalitarian regimes.
The totalitarian regimes that killed more than a hundred million people in the 20th century were not "monarchist". They were, as I have said, inspired by the French Revolution, and by the horrible idea that a small group of people can totally restructure society based on "reason". Every time it's been tried it has ended in, to use your phrase, insane murderers rising to the top.
> democracies plainly perform better, I don't think that can be disputed.
You do realize that "democracy" is also the term that regimes like the one installed by the French Revolution, and the Soviet Union, and the other totalitarian regimes that arose from small groups of people who claimed to be able to totally restructure society based on "reason", used to describe themselves, right?
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> We then had a large string of revolutions in Eastern Europe, in the late 80s/early 90s And the most salient fact about all of those is that they were hardly even revolutions. The Soviet Union stopped supporting its puppet governments in those countries, and the people of those countries, who had been more than ready to quit Soviet rule for quite some time, just did it. No fighting was necessary because practically…
That still sounds like a revolution to me. If we get to simply exclude all of the successful and largely bloodless ones, then of course revolutions are messy and risky. It is that way by definition!
The term "revolution", while it does not have to imply bloodshed, does imply some kind of struggle involved. My point about what happened in the countries of Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union fell was that there was no struggle at all, not even a bloodless one. Everyone just said "about time" and went about the business of running their own countries.
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I live in the U.S., so the basic rights I take for granted were already in place before the French Revolution. They are the result of the American Revolution, and before that the English one a century earlier. (And before that a long history of England and Britain gradually transferring power from the monarch to Parliament, going all the way back to the Magna Carta.) While neither of those revolutions were bloodless,…
Oddly enough, you're omitting the English Civil Wars, which have killed an order of magnitude more people than the French Revolution. But since they were mostly soldiers and peasants, as opposed to aristocrats and bourgeois, history doesn't make as big a deal out of that mountain of corpses. Also, the American Civil War, which was pretty instrumental towards the establishment of some rather basic human rights... Many…
I mentioned the American Civil War and its death toll in the post of mine that started this subthread. I agree that it did also establish basic human rights for the former slaves, who had not had them recognized before in the U.S.
The backsliding you refer to, however, did not happen during Reconstruction, when the Union's policy was anything but appeasement and compromise: the former Confederate states were basically under martial law. What started the backsliding was the back-room deal that gave Hayes, the Republican candidate in 1876, the Presidency in exchange for the Republicans agreeing to end Reconstruction, after the election went to the House of Representatives. In any case, the backsliding was not a matter of changing the actual legal status of basic human rights; it was simply state and local governments in certain regions deciding to just ignore that actual legal status when they felt like it, and the Federal government being either unwilling or unable to override them. What eventually changed that was the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.