I don't accept the demonization of fellow Americans based on bad faith arguments, but I sometimes I feel like this is a minority opinion. We should absolutely fight against specific events, behaviors, political rhetoric, and policies we disagree with. And sometimes individuals or small groups deserve to have their actions demonized as completely against our values. But looking for simple labels to place on literally millions of complex humans in order to point at simple answers to issues where simple answers don't exist is a fool's game.
Only one side denies climate change. Only one side denies medical consensus on vaccines and pandemic prevention techniques. Only one side is okay with mocking a disabled reporter (to pick one egregious example among countless).
Yes, if you're red/republican/conservative/right, you're voting for those things, you're signing off on them.
We don't need to "come together and find common ground" on those issues. We need to figure out how truth and decency lost their footing and slipped off the center stage.
> Yes, if you're red/republican/conservative/right, you're voting for those things, you're signing off on them.
I wish I were able to convey this better to some stubborn family members. The argument I hear is that they are voting for partial representation of their conservative values, and they are aware of the downsides of this choice. But I don't buy it. I think they are undervaluing the negative costs of that vote, or completely ignoring them.
I think it's crazy that so many people voted for Trump and honestly believe he's the best person to run the country. I'd have a hard time respecting someone who didn't see how bad Trump was in a lot of ways. But I think most people on the left seem to have no idea why anybody would vote for Trump, and don't realize that is more of an indictment of the extent they are out of touch with 49% of the country, rather than an indication of the idiocy of their political opponents.
An effective rejection of Trumpism must first involve understanding and relating to the people who supported him, and I think a lot of people are lamenting the general lack of interest in such discourse.
Edit: fixed two words which drastically changed the meaning of sentence.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subre...
Biden campaigned on raising the corporate income tax rate from 21% back to 28%. If you have a stock market portfolio (including an IRA or 401(k)) and this proposal is enacted, it will adversely affect the value of your investments. It's also been tied to student loan forgiveness, so people without college degrees who are investing for retirement (and those who've paid off their degrees) will in effect be subsidizing those with student loan debt, which is a demographic that skews affluent:
>https://www.educationnext.org/mass-debt-forgiveness-not-prog...
>Households in the upper half of the income distribution hold more student debt than those in the lower half. The highest-income quartile of households owes about one-third of that debt; the lowest-income quartile owes about 12 percent. People who don’t go to college don’t have student debt. They have lower incomes and more constrained job opportunities than others.
...out of the two options on the ballot. Which is also the only reason why so many people voted for Biden. The most mind-boggling thing from my German point of view is how little movement there is to leave the two-party system behind.
Having just two parties is insane, that simply means they can get away with anything & just take turns once in a while as voters have no other choice.
The situation is not perfect and the protest not without merit, as the government preatty much squandered any success we had handling the first wave of covid by doing preatty much no preparations, releasing almost all restrictions and then failed to respond in time when things turned for the worse in september.
I guess it can make people angry, if their livelyhood is in danger due to the restrictive measures needed after you fuck up the initial response to the second wave like we did here. Still violent protest is not really an answer and it was indeed an one-off so far. Hopefully people will remeber at least a bit of they not to vote the populist currently in power during the next elections next year.
Also there are regular protests in Belarus and now even in Poland these days that are bigger by many orders of magnitude that what we managed to pull off here since the Velvet Revolution when indeed preatty much everyone was in the streats, which resulted in the fall of the soviet aligned comunist regime back then.
There are in fact many parties in the USA. But unfortunately the USA is still using an early alpha release voting system that was invented in the 1700s before voting theory had been even understood.
The result of a majority win voting system is that it only legitimizes 2 parties in practice. This worked 'ok' so long as the 2 parties acted in good faith.
However the last 20-30 years the Republican party got twisted into a movement to undermine government, enrich themselves, and narrowly focus on a couple of right-wing Christian interests to distract a populist base. They've maintained their relevance by turning Fox news and other right-wing owned outlets into effectually state-run propaganda machines. Leaving only the Democrats trying to govern with the Republicans trying to undermine and obstruct that very government.
The only way out of the USA's problems is to have a modern preference voting method, or in the long term the country may be doom to fail.
Sure Hitler improved the German economy, does that make it defensible to support him?
This is the fundamental question in nationalist movements that are driven by ideologies, tribalism, and cult of personalities... instead of real facts backed up by science and data.
Given that provably almost nothing Trump ever says is even true, how can these people know he is the best person to govern? If there are no facts, it is just beliefs... and that is incredibly dangerous.
If we are constantly going on about how bad one side is (fwiw, I basically agree with you about that), then it will only lead to more division and resentment. Based on my in group's behavior, it seems like most people who believe this think that continuing to publicly shame and wag fingers at the other side is how we get to a better world. And it so clearly is not.
I'm frustrated by this, but also truly searching for solutions or alternative explanations.
Point being, anyone can pick and choose a handful of issues (and ignore others) to "prove" that anyone who votes for [insert party here] is morally bankrupt.
However, denial of scientific and historical fact is not something "anyone" can find instances of for "[insert party here]". Only on the right does that occur.
- Blacks commit far more crime than other racial groups. There are sociological explanations for this, but that is currently a fact, and one that people on the left do mental backflips to avoid acknowledging.
- Gender pay gap in most industries is small or non-existent once you adjust for experience and other factors. Not to say that there is no discrimination at all, but this is another thing people on the left can't or don't want to acknowledge.
Those are just two among many.
I mean, I think we've pretty well established that crime isn't genetic. It's environmental. So why frame it as if the opposite were true?
I haven't studied the demographic data at length recently, but fairly sure that your assertion does not hold for high income blacks.
I have no comment on the pay gap, I don't know much about it.
My own mother can't do this. She goes on about how the fbi crime statistics are probably "biased" in some way, though has no interest in finding out if or how that's the case. "It's obvious" she says. This greatly upsets me. How can we deal with problems if we can't look them straight in the face?
It's not just politically inconvenient, it's also lacking a lot of nuance. Native Americans commit crimes at an even higher rate than African Americans do. The two groups share a long history of violent disenfranchisement. Taking the statistics in isolation, yes Native Americans and African Americans do commit crime at higher than average rates. But ignoring structural issues is just as disingenuous as ignoring the data.
> But it's also the truth, and one that might help explain why african americans are more likely to have interactions with police (a group I have no love for, tbh).
Can you prove this cause and effect chain? The rate at which African Americans encounter the police is much greater than the rate at which violent crimes are committed. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I haven't seen any causality research here, but the way you've juxtaposed these claims implies that you believe there's causality here.
[1] https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/1352-1...
In reality, twin studies and adoption studies have shown a large genetic component.
We don't even need twin studies to know this. It must be true unless you're a young-earth creationist. If there wasn't genetic variability in criminality, humans wouldn't have been capable of evolving to be so much less violent than other primates.
(And of course, disparities in male/female behavior is obviously biological.)
> I haven't studied the demographic data at length recently, but fairly sure that your assertion does not hold for high income blacks.
In fact, it does hold in higher income brackets too. And I'd bet whites are more violent than Asians after controlling for income, too.
Here are the major factors I've looked at: The previously mentioned (and most significant by far) years of experience (which for many women is affected by having children), hours spent at work, self-rated confidence, (personality trait) agreeableness, etc. etc.
There's a reason why in European countries parental leave is split between both parents and there's effort to make it easier for men to be caretakers.
(To be clear: whether or not this pay gap needs addressing is its own question entirely. It makes total sense to me that a woman needs time off to recover from giving birth or from health complications during pregnancy.)
EDIT: I'd ask for valid science showing a fetus isn't alive, doesn't feel pain, etc., but the science is clear here. The question isn't in the science but in the implications. Like it or not (here... apparently not), the conservative position on abortion had a lot of hard science to back it up.
Shouldn't choosing to raise a family account for the experience gap? Yes, this is an example of one way that we've structured society so that women tend to have fewer career opportunities. IMO, there is not a good reason men (as a demographic) shouldn't be spending an equal amount of time raising children.
If only nuance were present when politicians on the left make misleading or false statements like "women (are) paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men".
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jun/21/barack-oba...
> Shouldn't choosing to raise a family account for the experience gap?
Edit: I think I misread your second paragraph. Choosing to raise a family likely does account for the existence of the experience gap, if that's what you mean; but raising a family isn't equivalent to on-the-job experience.
The same is true with the "diversity is strength" mantra, where everyone seems to cite that one feel-good McKinsey study as if that told the full story.
This kind of naivety is not as bad as burning the planet, but at the end of the day, it's still people looking at studies and saying "can't be true".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turner_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_X_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrasomy_X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentasomy_X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
Clearly it takes more than a dichotomy of chromosomal options to define one's gender. You're drastically oversimplifying "biological science" in order to put forth an example of the left denying scientific fact.
More importantly though, the left's "agenda" with regards to trans people isn't about rejecting medical or scientific consensus on gender. A trans woman's doctor is still going to give her advice tailored to her specific case of being born with a male body. It's about accepting people for who they want to be, and that doesn't clash with any category of facts or knowledge. Implying otherwise is disingenuous.
I think you have some misunderstandings about the term "definition", misunderstandings that I certainly used to have. We use this term both in mathematics and the sciences, but only mathematics has true definitions (as in, a logical statement which precisely determines a set). I can define a right angle as the angle that makes all four angles of an intersection of two straight lines equal. We can show that it's a unique value, exactly 90 degrees, and neither 40 degrees nor 89.8 degrees are right angles. Only 90 degrees _exactly_ is a right angle.
By contrast, in other sciences we usually only have categories with fuzzy borders. Take for instance the term "species". Wikipedia says "A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction." But as a definition, in the mathematical sense, this just doesn't work, at all. One obvious shortcoming is that every infertile individual forms a species by itself, by this definition.
But the main shortcoming is that on casual inspection, it looks like it's defining sets of organisms: the set of rabbits, the set of horses, etc. But it is not, because these sets don't exist. Let A0 be a rabbit. A0's parents are themselves rabbits, and the parents of those rabbits were themselves rabbits, and so on. But rabbits haven't existed forever, and at some point we reach an ancestor An of our initial rabbit that we would no longer consider a rabbit: species(An) /= species(A0) (where for all X: species(X) is a set). But this did not happen through some break in continuity: at any point, we would consider an organism and its offspring as belonging to the same species. But then this individual An must be of the same species as A0: species(An) = species(A{n-1}) = ... = species(A0). We have a contradiction.
So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?
When we'd program a video game which has rabbits in it, we'd probably neatly define some data structure or class named "Rabbit" which simulates the rabbit. But this is not how reality works: we just have a bunch of particles that are interacting which eachother. Crucially, from these particle interactions emerge certain patterns which we can observe. Our concept of "rabbit" is not imposed on the universe from the top down, on the contrary: our brains pick up on recurring patterns in the particle soup around us, and giving these recurring patterns names helps us communicate, and therefore, survive (this is what we call abstraction; I have another long rant on this forum about abstraction, if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429749). But no two instances of such a pattern are identical, and exactly where one pattern ends and the next begins is somewhat arbitrary. Any strict definition of "rabbit" is doomed to fail.
Think of it as neural net classification: each object in the universe has some "rabbitness" value. The keyboard I'm typing this on has very low rabbitness. A fox has significantly higher rabbitness (it breathes, has four legs, two ears, etc) but still not very high rabbitness. Crucially, rabbitness is completely determined by some distance metric from earlier examples. So rabbitness is determined by _relative_ distance to earlier examples, not by anything absolute. We draw lines, somewhat arbitrarely, in this space and name them to help us communicate (such as: anything over .95 rabbitness is a rabbit). But these names are but tools and different names or different borders can be used in different contexts.
So back to sex/gender. Within the particle soup around us, we recognise the pattern "human" (or any sexually reproducing animal). We notice another pattern in these humans: they seem to fall apart into two categories based on their role in reproduction and physical appearance. We name these categories "male" and "female". But again, the borders are fuzzy and no hard definition can be found. Not all men have penises, there are women with beards, etc. Eventually, we discover DNA and find out that men tend to have XY chromosomes and women XX chromosomes. So do we have our hard definition of gender/sex now? Not at all. Not every person has either XX or XY. There are also "male-presenting" people with XX chromosomes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome).
So attempting to define sex based on chromosomes falls flat, and leads to absurdities. Suppose you become friends with a male-presenting XX, who does not know he has XX chromosomes. He has male genitalia, has identified as male his entire life, and has been addressed as he/him his entire life. Then he gets tested for infertility and finds out he has XX chromosomes, and tells you this. Will you now insist to your friend that he is a woman? Will you insist on adressing him with female pronouns? Does he have to change his gender on his passport?
I would find it absurd, not to mention cruel, to do so. We're in a situation here where it seems more productive to accept that we use overloaded terms to mean different things at different levels of abstraction. Sure, on a genetic level he's "female". But he's male in how society interfaces with him, which is much more relevant to him in most situations. So why not just say "he is male", and only discuss his genetic makeup if and when that is pertinent?
In a nutshell, you are nitpicking. You can always define an arbitrary scale at which nothing matters: you used time in your rabbit example very effectively to discount the usefulness of the "rabbit category". Or you used these XX males as a counter example to a rigid definition of gender. You even yourself realise that this way of thinking is completely useless as you yourself say that the category of species is extremely useful:
> So strictly logically speaking, this definition is useless. Nevertheless, the concept of species is clearly a useful concept that helps us communicate things about the real world. How do we explain this?
I can explain this for you: you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught. It is not: life is... continuous! Like the integral: each point has measure 0 but when you "add" a transfinite amount of 0 measure points you get... non-zero area! This resolves your rabbit paradox: each generation of rabbit is a point with measure 0 since its "difference" is so small with the generation before and after that it we can model it as 0...
Or second model: Rabbit_n = 0.9999 * Rabbit_{n+1}
After 100 generations: similarity is already 0.99
After 1000 generations: similarity is 0.90
After 10000 generations: similarity is 0.36
Tadaa: problem solved. So don't think so hard about this, use your common sense and realise that most people are men and most people are women and a few edge cases do not matter for practical purposes. And this is the crux of the matter: we need to make decisions. Hence we do what you very well describe: we categorise the particle soup around us and we act. So the usefulness of categories/abstractions CAN ONLY EVER BE MEASURED BY THEIR USEFULNESS FOR DECISION MAKING (sorry for caps I but want to emphasize). When I say decision making I mean almost everything: from deciding what sandwich to eat to deciding on how to prove Fermat's last theorem. If categories help you to do things, they are useful. End of story (for me, you can go write a book about this, make sure to send me a free copy).
Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
> you are thinking life is logical and "discreet" because you are a programmer and this is what you were taught.
Perhaps I did not express myself clearly, but my point is _the exact opposite_! Life is indeed not logical and discreet, as witnessed by the fact that vaguely defined categories are clearly tremendously useful. But these categories become misleading when one makes the mistake of identifying them with logically defined sets (ie when one thinks in logically reductive ways, the style of thinking you attribute to me). This is the mistake that I claim to identify in listenallyall's post.
They make the claim that XX _equals_ female and XY _equals_ male. To be clear, I don't actually think that the statement "men have XY chromosomes and women have XX chromosomes" is wrong or must be qualified every time. It's "mostly right", in the same sense that Newtonian physics is "mostly right", and adequate for most discussions where you're not looking at the edge cases of sex or gender, which is most such discussions.
But when talking about transgender people (it has not been explicitly stated that this is the subject of our discussion, but given the context I think it's fair to assume that it is), we are arguing _exactly about the edge cases_ of the gender categories. listenallyall's argument boils down to: the "male" set and the "female" set are clearly, logically defined by sex chromosomes, therefore there are no edge cases, and (speculating a bit from here on about what their point is) trans people just have to suck it up and stop claiming they are what they are not.
This is an argument based on the assumption that life is logical and discreet, that the universe has some obligation to provide you with neatly defined sets to help you understand the world. My way of showing that this is wrong is by making two arguments:
1) Life is not logical and discreet, as I tried to illustrate with the rabbit example (and I think you and I are making exactly the same point there),
2) If you go along with this discreet, "logical" reasoning, you end up with absurdities (the XX-presenting male example). I think this is where my post perhaps got a bit confusing: I am _not_ arguing for this style of thinking, but I'm going along with it to show that it is unproductive. It is undeniable that if you accept listenallyall's argument, you must either insist that a male-presenting XX is actually a woman, or be logically inconsistent.
A far more useful way to see gender is like the rabbit example. You have a bunch of sex-related characteristics which are bimodally distributed, and from that you can have a "maleness" and "femaleness" value for every person. How you weight individual variables (like "broadness of shoulders") is a bit arbitrary. Sex chromosomes are just one variable among many in this equation, with no special status. In fact, they are for most discussions probably one of the least relevant factors, as evidenced by the fact that we got by with our "male" and "female" categories for millennia without even knowing about chromosomes, and in everyday life our views of sex and gender don't seem to be particularly informed by chromosomes. We can then move on and treat gender as a "duck typed" property: if someone presents as a certain gender, refers to themselves as a certain gender, etc, they are that gender.
In conservative circles, statements like "gender is a social construct" are basically a meme, a clear proof that progressives are detached from reality. To be clear, I'm not sure I fully agree with that statement either. But for _decision making_, this is clearly a more productive view than "gender = chromosomes". I have XY chromosomes (I think) and a penis, but this is for most practical purposes much less relevant than the fact that I interact with society through the "male" interface (although I appreciate that I can use urinals). Why should I be not be free to choose which interface to interact through?
The progressive argument to treat transgender people as their preferred gender is the stronger argument for any sort of practical decision making: to refuse to do so causes needless suffering in people who have done no wrong. Insisting that a trans woman is actually a man, should be treated as a man, should be referred to with male pronouns, etc, makes the lives of these people significantly worse, and makes no one else's life better. It is also no different than insisting a male-presenting XX is a woman, which I think is also obviously cruel.
The only conservative argument I've ever heard against this is based on precisely the reductive thinking you attribute to me: to insist that one variable (chromosomes) out of many is not just more heavily weighted than what is justifiable for any practical purpose, but actually _strictly defines_ gender, ignoring _all other factors_. They then throw themselves up as champions of science and reason, because clearly progressives are detached from reality. This style of thinking is both wrong (as in, it leads to inconsistencies and is based on a high school level understanding of science and epistemology) and unproductive (you don't gain anything in terms of practical decision making).
> Finally, this is also all bs so don't take it too seriously: I am a person on the internet.
No worries, I enjoy these kinds of discussion, otherwise I wouldn't spend any time on it. But I can't help but take it somewhat seriously too. The outcome of this debate doesn't affect me very much, but there are people whose lives will be worse if "my side" loses the debate.
> it was all cp and youthful arrogance.
What is "cp"?
No objective observer would ever say that either side “advocates for abortion”. That’s the sort of thing a demagogue right-winger would say to try to score cheap political points.
Can you provide a scan of a health insurance invoice where there’s a line item for an abortion which you didn’t request or receive? It doesn’t have to be your receipt; any insurance invoice from literally anybody in California where they were charged specifically for an abortion that they didn’t request or receive?
I’ll wait.
Or is this a specious argument like the perennial classic, “I had to pay taxes which went in part toward maintaining the roads and I never drove on that particular road over there and so therefore the taxes are unfair”? Because I am very interested in your opinions if that’s the direction you’ve decided to argue, here.
You’re incorrect about this one AFAIK. From the Safety of Childhood MMR Vaccine section of [0]:
> There are no differences between party groups about this issue. Moderates are a bit more likely than either conservatives or liberals to say that childhood vaccines are generally safe.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2015/07/01/chapter-5-pub...
If one side doesn't believe in truth, facts and science, and the other side defends them as fundamental to everything... than those are not equivalent positions.
This has been largely a one-sided war on decency. Don't kill the messenger.
This is, of course, no defence of Trump's behavior in this instance.
i do not have to like or support trump to think that joe biden is a lifelong robber barron and his return to normalcy will be marked by suffering around the world and absolute blindness towards the the deaths of despair happening within our own country.
1. Reality is often only reported in “liberal” news sources. A lot of information is censored on right wing sources.
2. Both types of news sources editorialize in the headline. Sometimes it’s hard to know they even refer to the same story.
3. People trying to achieve balance in reporting often relocate players onto the wrong team. For example, the Mueller report is not a “left wing” document and balance is not achieved by putting Mueller against a Trump surrogate.
4. “Liberal” sources already include plenty of right wing opinions. For example, David Brooks and Ross Douthat write for the New York Times. There’s no equivalent among the Wall St Journal columnists or Fox News hosts.
5. News stories found only in right wing sources are usually mendacious. For example, reporting about the Michigan ballot glitch without mentioning that it was human error and corrected before reporting the results.
Fundamentally, it’s not that we have differing information, it’s that we only accept information that confirms our world view. I can read dozens of articles written from the point of view that universal health care will destroy the country and not one will ever resonate with me. It’s just too silly to me.
I used to think that too but it's not true. Example: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/president-elect-joe-biden-to...
It's really hard to get a balance look at the news when everything has it's own slant but it's worth the effort I think to understand the nuance.
I think that they see their role to push for their side and have zero ideological commitment to any semblance of anything else. Do you get sleepy Biden in clear stage of dementia, again and again.
Note that I an not claiming journals should be objective. They can't. Just that there are more lines to cross. And frankly, liberal journals do go out of their way to extend empathy to "other side" more often.
Carl Sagan, in his 1995 book ‘The Demon-Haunted World’, wrote:
> I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The moment he prophesied now appears to be upon us. I don’t know how we can restore this country to one where people mostly act in good faith and try to base decisions in science and fact. I see so many incredibly compassionate people supporting the most despicable politicians. Right-wingers on Twitter repeating false talking points that the left are trying to destroy the country while tweeting about how proud they are of local youth offering free lawn care to disabled and senior citizens. Left-wingers openly insulting rural and conservative people as the scum of the earth while relentlessly supporting policies intended to improve those same peoples’ lives. How does this happen? What do we have to do—as individuals, as nations, as humans—to get it to stop?
[0] - https://twitter.com/KySportsRadio/status/1324552953861210112
Thinking you understand technology seems to reliably lead to overconfidence. That's better left to advisers, who then have their advice filter by people who are sceptical of things that aren't tried and true and well understood on the holistic basis of actual use in practice.
Individuals, their inner world and potential are very important, but you have systematically mortified the importance - and the “evolutionary advantage” - of the human societal organization.
Over optimization for the hedonistic “self bootstrapped” man turned most of you - that don’t have the strength, but most likely the luck, to be Randian heroes - into the exact opposite: submissive corporate drones.
It’s time to lay the groundwork for long term change, isn’t it?
A higher degree of basic solidarity will help us a lot.
I sort of feel like we're in that old tale where king Solomon says they should cut the baby in two, and both sides are like "ok, I'll take my half of the baby, then."
Ultimately, though, I personally blame the extreme right wing, mostly. I think they're dying, and they're not going down without a fight, like, you know, disinformation, bullying, holding the country hostage metaphorically, whatever. If they're going down, the whole system's going down with them.
Part of the problem is the candidates the parties are fielding. I know lots of people who view trump, clinton and biden as corrupt. None of them are good candidates.
I'm just wondering if there is a good way for a strong third (and fourth and fifth...) party to form under the current system? Are there any good examples from other countries making that transition, and can they be applied in the US as well?
I used to think the same way, but many (most?) countries in Europe end up having coalitions anyway, so you end up really having just two blocks. More parties might give you the option to choose a party that is more after your taste, but in reality you (often) end up with coalitions that take most ideas from the strongest party within the coalition.
I would assume the same thing would happen within the Democratic/Republican Party in the States as well, i.e. a compromise between the left/right wings within these parties based on what is shared by most members(?)
So, much more compromise than division. This comes back to the voters also. On every divisive topic you have a number of viewpoints instead of two polar opposites.
IMO we have had much better quality governments since from either end of the spectrum. We had a notorious populist authoritarian in the 70s and early 80s, and I don't see those days coming back.
New Zealand changed away from First Past the Post to Mixed Member Proportional in order to fix that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_New_Zealan...
I'm not sure how you'd implement it, particularly at the senate level.
However, the key point is that such a system would mainly benefit a potential third party, but any changes to the system need to be agreed upon by the current representatives whose interests and reelection would be hurt by such a change.
Most agree that FPTP is bad, but nobody agrees on what to replace it with
Without a majority, the election is decided by the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote, where each vote is determined by a majority of that state's delegation.
And there, the Republicans have a built-in advantage similar to their Senate advantage, as every state is guaranteed at least one representative regardless of population. Even after the Democratic House victory in 2018, Republicans still had the majority of 26 state federal delegations.
I believe this is really just a return to the way things used to be, before the US decided to intervene in WWII and had to find a way to pay for the massive cost of that. Conservative and liberal are not opposites like everybody thinks these days. Conservative and progressive are opposites. Liberal and authoritarian are opposites. Both parties are (or should be) focused on the American ideal of liberalism and representative government chosen by the people while either preserving traditional values or advocating for enlightenment values.
However, real life is not that cut and dry, politics are messy, parties don’t fall exactly along these lines and the media plays a part in dictating who should believe what. But in general I think Trump is an indicator that we’re headed for a more traditional alignment of values. Who knows, perhaps a viable third party will emerge from this. A Conservative party, a progressive party, and a Bretton Woods establishment party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
I would agree, to some extent, if Trump wasn't the Conservative candidate. Trump has flouted the law to the extent that very, very few American Presidents have. Where I was afraid that Obama was passing too many Executive Orders, Trump outright tried to rule by Executive Order fiat. Conservative parties pre-Bretton Woods were certainly isolationist and domestic-first, but also had a deep affection for the rule of law. I would oppose a traditionally conservative party politically, but would not be nearly as negative about it as I am about a President that seems to want to actively subvert rule of law.
Meh, I must have become a cynical grumpy old person: to me politics has always been a game for rich, old people.
Now it's like hope for a better, radically different world has just disappeared. It's with us or against us. There's no third choice.
The Cold War ended and the USSR peacefully dissolved, democracy was ascendant, the Good Friday Agreement ended The Troubles, East and West Germany reunified, the Schengen Area and the Eurozone were established, the International Space Station opened an era of international cooperation in peaceful space exploration, life expectancy was up, disposable income was up, new and amazing technologies were developed at record pace, substantially improved treatments for fatal conditions like HIV and cancer were entering the market, we’d nearly cracked the human genome, we’d made great progress in eradicating infectious diseases, people around the world were being lifted out of poverty, crime was down, the Western economy was strong. The world seemed less divided and closer together than ever.
Today, tensions between superpowers are up. Russia and North Korea have renewed the threat of nuclear armed conflict. The UK exited the EU. There’s an obesity crisis. Many of our amazing technologies have turned out to be terribly unhealthy and destabilising. Authoritarianism is on the rise, along with domestic and sectarian terrorism. The Western economy was shattered in 2008 and now there’s a global pandemic. Immigrants fleeing instability in other countries have led to political upheaval and conflict. The US became an unreliable ally. And, above all, the existential threat of climate change looms over their entire future.
> Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.
> Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner.
-Orwell
The US faces no threat of being conquered, it has the most powerful military and intelligence capacity in the world by a healthy margin. Insofar as foreign interference creates division, it's precisely the lack of decentralisation that makes these attacks dangerous.
What can you listen to? You can't have a reasonable debate when one side if just making things up.
Abortion is science, climate change is science, race and gender differences are proven facts.
Edit:instead of downvoting me explain what's wrong? Wtf. So much for listening...
The thing is, Trump is just a symptom of some disease which the country has been suffering for many years. I'd say it's a mix of a lot of things, e.g. the decline of scientific education + decline of the middle class + a lot of other things.
We need to funnel money back into public education; the next generation is our only hope.
While I’ve often found that people can’t handle this question and just disengage, if you do get an answer, then you can actually try to say what they need to hear. They may move the goalposts after getting an answer, but it’s better than wasting time throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
This sounds like a much more conservative opinion than perhaps you intended.
...has actually been disproven more than it's been proven. Or rather, proven to be caused by things other than discrimination, as "wage gap" is meant to imply.
No, to me it is ethics!
Edit, added: Killing an innocent child does not have anything to do with science.
A fetus isn't viable until week 20ish. Even then it won't survive outside the mothers body. 1% of abortions happen after week 20.
About 90% of abortions happen before week 13. It's not even a fetus at this point. The body it self might abort still at this point, this is when mis carriages happen.
Why do you feel an unviable collection of cells is a human?
Because it is human, and it is alive.
It is human, in the sense that it is descended from humans and is not dog or a dandelion or a caterpillar. It has human genetic code. It is one continuous line from the merge of two human sex cells to full-grown human. There is no jump, somewhere along the way, from not human to human.
It is alive. A plant is alive, so surely so is a fetus.
> A fetus isn't viable until week 20ish.
Whether it is viable doesn't determine whether it is human or alive. A two-year-old outside the womb isn't very viable either. In fact, some 20-year-olds aren't very viable.
Viability is shaky ground upon which to base legal protection. Just think of the handicapped or those with other chronic maladies. Or any of us can become unviable temporarily through some accident or acute illness. Does our right to life disappear?
> Why do you feel an unviable collection of cells is a human
A "collection of cells" does not describe a fetus any better than an adult.
- At about 18 days, there is a heartbeat
- At about 40 days, there is brain activity
- By the end of the first trimester, it has all its organs. It just needs to grow.
"Photography of the human fetus developing in the womb": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD1gW88Lm-Y
> What does location have to do with it?
Inside the womb or outside the womb, its location seems to be the dimension used by those who say abortion is okay.
The difference between fetus and infants is the first is still attached to its mother. Its continued growth depends on its attachment to mother. Similar to a tumor.
I don't think you actually understand what you are talking about if you are confused about the term viability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_viability
Your link to photos means you are forming your opinion based off emotion and not understanding the difference between cells splitting, and what a independent human is.
At what point do you think the sperm and egg are human? Even the first split after they join is still just two cells.
What proof do you have that says a fetus at 16 weeks is alive? How are you defining alive?
> it has all its organs. It just needs to grow.
This is still dependent on the mother, it is not its own thing at this point.
Yes, and they are all human, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human
> None of these are living humans yet. They're pre humans.
Citation needed.
> without an identity or awareness
That is pretty easily disproven scientifically. Not even a biologist who is for legal abortion would say that a baby in the womb is unaware. There was an ultrasound a long time ago where you see the fetus recoil from the abortionist's knife. Of course it's aware. Just because it can't see the outside world yet doesn't mean it's unaware.
As far as identity, well, it has a unique fingerprint, DNA, etc. Are you saying you don't have an identity until there's a birth certificate?
> At what point do you think the sperm and egg are human?
Well, they are human from inception (see above). But they are a separate human being at conception.
> What proof do you have that says a fetus at 16 weeks is alive? How are you defining alive?
Even a single cell is alive. You have drifted from textbook science at this point.
> This is still dependent on the mother
Dependence doesn't disqualify you from being human or alive.
> Even a single cell is alive. You have really drifted from textbook science at this point.
We're not talking about human cells being alive. were talking about the whole organism being considered alive and its own thing.
Talking about whether an organism that can not exist independently of its host, that hasn't experienced life yet can be aborted by that host.
It feels like your being disingenuous arguing semantics like cell life with me. Yes cells are live, no the organism is not an independent thing with its own rights. An nonviable fetus is not a fully grown human, this isn't killing babies.
This is not some clump of cells that "responds to stimulus" before birth and magically becomes "conscious and aware" after birth. It doesn't even line up with fetal viability.
> We're not talking about human cells being alive. were talking about the whole organism being considered alive and its own thing.
The whole organism is alive and its own thing from conception. This is undisputed among biologists.
There is only one race, the human race. There are differences between ethnic groups, but we are all created in God's image because we're all descended from Adam. I don't know anyone who seriously thinks there are no differences with gender? Except maybe some gender confused professors at my University, but that aside does anyone who is sane really think they are the same? Man and Woman, while having physical deferences, different roles, and responisbilities, are nonethless equal before God.
I don't know what you mean by Abortion is science, but I do know that it is wrong because it's killing an innocent human being.
I explained my poor wording somewhere else in this thread.
Why do you feel an unviable collection of cells is a human life? It has no thought, that is what makes us human. At that point its a collection of cells leaching off the mother
Humananity is not defined by the ability to think. Even before the first thought the human embryo is not just a collection of cells. It's a distinct organism. It is dependent on the mother but those cells are independent in the sense that it directs itself on how to form. If you could remove an embryo from the womb and give it a good environment and nutrients it would form just the same. The unborn baby isn't slowly assembled out of parts to make a whole, the embryo is already functioning, it's a distinct human life. It is already human. If you define humanity by thought would you say a 3 year old is less human than a 10 year because their thoughts are less complex? What about when you're sleeping, are you less human when you're unconscious? Humanity is also not defined by it's viability. Is a wounded soldier who will die without life support all of a sudden less human or less valuable because his life depends on an outside source?
The embryo is a distinct human being that can direct it's own formation. It is separate from the mother's cells. And that is why it is a human life.
but instead we keep running referendums on failed obama policies combined with the sociocultural neurosis of overmedicated grad students while trying to pretend all of that is not the whitest shit imaginable.
The purpose of the bubbles is to keep you clicking or pressing. The purpose of that is to deliver ads or sell premium services. If uncomfortable views are presented a user may click or press out of the service. Those uncomfortable views are not to be confused with click bait allowed to drive bubble responses.
No use blaming the architects or company leaders. If you are coding it up, maintaining the infrastructure, or providing auxiliary support to the bubble, you are responsible. The companies making the bubbles can't do it without you, and you are the one actually making it happen.
For example, want to bring manufacturing jobs back?
1. Implement trade-protectionist tariffs and import restrictions.
2. Unionize rural workforces to make the pay and work conditions attractive.
3. Offer massive tax incentives to build manufacturing centers in rural states.
4. Reinstitute a manufacturing oriented education system that outputs ready-to-work trained trade employees.
The parties are too far apart now to be able to put in place something like this.
Open the gates for immigration.
Work with allies to impose extreme tariffs on China.
Build manufacturing in India, Mexico, Vietnam, and Africa. Own the shipping.
Offer US statehood to Taiwan and keep the South China Sea open to all US Allies. Korea, Japan, Vietnam, etc.
We need to protect our lead in tech and information and attack China's chances of leapfrogging us. Protect our industries, protect democracy. Build up our allies. Build a stronger world.
The risk is that China becomes better than us at everything we do. Then what do we have? Being protectionist is anti-growth. Industry and innovation shut down.
A new cold war is coming. The sooner we get ahead of it, the better prepared we'll be.
The future is knowledge work. Manufacturing domestically is regressive. We need to put the supply chain in the hands of our developing allies.
We shouldn't want to train anyone to do menial jobs anyway. We're about to enter an era where we'll have plenty of creative, knowledge jobs for everyone.
We need to protect and expand knowledge work.
They can also be done without isolationism, but probably not without redistributing the wealth that has concentrated in the hands of the 0.1% over decades (under both parties) back into the general population.
Trump's actions this week have been utterly shameful. He and his cronies have lied and lied in an organised effort to sow discontent among the huge segment of republicans that appear to believe their every word (regardless of how baseless or ridiculous they may be).
It seems like such a blatant attempt to subvert democracy - the kind of thing we'd expect in a tinpot dictatorship, not the "land of the free". This is not only shameful, but downright dangerous, especially with the level of gun ownership in the US.
As a European, it seemed utterly incomprehensible how he has been able to get away with his actions, inactions and lies over the past few years - and I have not the words to describe how incomprehensible it is that many of his supporters are behind the past week's events.
I feel that the first structural steps must be
1./ Replace First Past the Post (it distorts the will of the people) with some version of ranked balloting (already in use in at least one US state)
2./ Dissolve or fix/improve the Electoral College
Pardon, but isn't USA already divided approx. 50/50?
From the outside (I'm from Norway), I can't even believe how shit the US politics is.
We’re actually at an inflection point where before white men were the elite, no question, that was what it took to get in the door outside a few congressional districts.
Now it’s still mostly that but it takes more, and due to demographic shifts it will be that less and less. The right — belatedly (far too little far too late, and quite awkwardly) — has already started outreach to Latino and black communities. They will continue but it will take a while (what an embarrassment for the party of Lincoln. FFS.).
Obama was a lighting strike to those who assumed it would always be the old way, and Trump was the response to Obama.
Fortunately, that failed (unfortunately it took hundreds of thousands of dead Americans to convince enough Michiganders, Wisconsinites, Pennsylvanians (I’m sure about “Michiganders”, being one myself, no idea on the others) but at least it happened.)
The left, quite cleverly, responded with Biden, an old white guy in the classic mold. Literally: nothing to fear here, white peeps... but with Kamala as VP — a powerless position yet a powerful symbol (especially as the VP of a VP cum President).
So It’s the changing of the guard. Republicans can no longer simply ignore black and brown people (at best) or use them as bugaboos (and then Democrats won’t be able to simply count on their votes by not actively being racist). Once the powerful engage those groups they’ll find them not to be uniform, and (hopefully) that will lead to meaningful, nuanced, deep engagement... if that happens, there will no longer be such a thing as the “black vote”. (This is further along with Latinos, where some groups aren’t too overwhelmingly for one party or the other).
So...
Not really an existential crisis, at least not to my mind. It’s real progress. We can no longer force certain groups into blocks based on whether we actively believe they should be subjugated or just kinda ignore them.
Hallelujah.
Then the transition of power or the changing demographics you speak of will disenfranchise those once in power and that could lead to violence (think white heavily-armed men intimidating or worse those they disagree with). This is what I fear as well.
Yes, BUT: this has already peaked. A long time ago. This started big a while ago and has had ever-weakening aftershocks... Oklahoma City, Waco, Charlottesville.
Now we’re at the stage of a flash Trump caravan maybe provoking a fender-bender and baseless lawsuits from a couple of NY goons.
It’s done.
The quicker people realize this the better. (They won’t realize it quickly, unfortunately. The champions of “conservative” right now are a porno-appearing, self-bragging pussy-grabber, and a bizarrely diminished former NY mayor who now unsuccessfully promotes conspiracy theories and is a punchline in a Borat movie.)
As for dividing the US, I hope the lesson of this election is that you shouldn't assume what you see online is representative of the real US - otherwise it would have been a landslide for Biden.
“History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes”
Do you think that the bipartidism is to blame, amongst other factors? If there were more options then some of the most radical electorate will have their own candidate and it could help divide the support they get at the Chambers.
Also smaller parties could help in having more negotiation for bills and laws.
I feel like we're likely already in the middle of a divide and conquer situation.
The problem is that the US has a historical example of what happens when the "economic engine" and the "conservative culture" reach an impasse.
The "economic engine" wins. The question is how much damage will get done until that happens.
No way. Polarization will continue. The politics of New York and California will remain anathema to the majority in "fly-over states" (e.g., Texas, Montana, etc.) for generations. The former two states (NY, CA) will economically self-destruct long before such acceptance occurs.
How do people with functioning moral compasses come together with the kind of people who see pictures of children in cages and say "America, fuck yeah?"
How do people who want some form of democratic government come together with the kind of people who think it's entirely right and proper for a president to do his best to prevent his political opponents from voting -- by disrupting the postal service, by soliciting the help of multiple hostile foreign governments to smear his opponent, calling for his opponents to be imprisoned without charge, and by attempting to halt vote counting in the courts?
How do people with any kind of respect for the value of human life watch video of the George Floyd killing and come together with the kind of people who watch the video and argue that the police did nothing wrong?
I don't think these divides can be healed. These issues are not matters, like arguments over the size of government, where compromise is both possible and mutually beneficial. Instead, they are moral red lines about which compromise is neither possible or desirable. What the 70-odd million who voted from Trump want out of their country isn't compatible with the basic moral outlook of the 75-odd million people who voted against him.
To take an extreme example, if a bunch of Nazis want to kill 10 million people, 'compromising' by agreeing to let them kill only 5 million people isn't acceptable -- and yet, this is exactly the kind of moral compromise (truly in the other sense of the word) that would be involved in bringing together Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions.
In addition to the moral divide, there is a reality/gullibility divide between the Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions. Trumpists believe an awful lot of stuff that is factually untrue. They reject global warming and dismiss the scientific evidence as the product of a Chinese hoax to destroy America. 56% of Republicans now believe in Qanon (an ideological conspiracy theory born out of the argument that Democrats eat babies) to some extent[0]. The overwhelming majority of Trumpists get their news from Fox, a media outlet which spreads more misleading information than accurate information.[1] How does anyone with a commitment to respecting consensus reality reach people who have chosen to live in comforting fantasyland rather than cope with the world as it is?
I don't see any way for the US to get out of this mess without breaking up into multiple countries.
And, to the usual 'downvote to -1' crowd: what part of this analysis is wrong?
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...
[1] https://www.politicususa.com/2015/02/06/fact-checker-finds-6...
If about 47% of your country was happy to kill democracy and reward immoral behaviour just to retain power, often justified by religious beliefs...
And Trump is not gone yet... Who knows what the Republicans will do with the stacked Supreme Court...
If you think half the country wants to rewrite the Constitution and remove democracy...I'm not really sure what to say.
A more plausible explanation here would be indifference. Maybe they don't want to remove democracy, but not exactly trying to uphold it over everything else either.
Maybe seeing your cult of personality hero in office, or your religion or your flavour of boogieman (=not losing the country to commies kind of thinking) has ultimately higher priority than keeping the democracy alive.
I'm not saying that's what is happening, I'm just saying I can see how masses can smother democracy without specifically having the intention to kill it.
disclaimer: non-US, my opinion on anything US would be at best inaccurate.
There are many valid reasons to vote for all candidates and the weighting of the issues is personal and perhaps not everyone agrees with the weighting that you do.
And these 47% would say exactly the same thing about the others. That’s the divide GP was pointing out and ironically your response is perpetuating it. Stop dehumanizing people.
I can't speak for the beliefs or rationale of the people who voted for him but its crystal clear what Donald Trump stood for.
I don't think its dehumanizing to talk about the fact that lots people, many or most individually good, chose to vote for a sexist, racist, authoritarian.
And does anybody really doubt at this point that Trump is those things?
Even though it is a difficult, unpleasant, and heated conversation to have.
What do you think those 47% want with gays, abortion (is murder!!!!) and foreigners?
Knowing full well what this last administration is up to?
Trump didn’t run on an anti-gay platform.
You’re right that anti-abortion is still big. Until you can convince people that it’s not murder, it’s pretty hard to get them to back down from that stance. This is honestly the only reason the Republicans trap so much of the religious vote.
“Foreigners” is also not something Republicans are against, it’s illegal immigration that’s the complaint. That’s why they support reforms that still allow significant immigration.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/07/21/trump...
> Our laws and our government’s regulations should recognize marriage as the union of one man and one woman and actively promote married family life as the basis of a stable and prosperous society. For that reason, as explained elsewhere in this platform, we do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states. We oppose government discrimination against businesses or entities which decline to sell items or services to individuals for activities that go against their religious views about such activities.
https://gop.com/platform/renewing-american-values/#Item2
> Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society and has for millennia been entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values. We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law. We also condemn the Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was a “judicial Putsch” — full of “silly extravagances” — that reduced “the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Storey to the mystical aphorisms of a fortune cookie.” In Obergefell, five unelected lawyers robbed 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The Court twisted the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond recognition. To echo Scalia, we dissent. We, therefore, support the appointment of justices and judges who respect the constitutional limits on their power and respect the authority of the states to decide such fundamental social questions.
- To make H1b people less appealing to companies, keeping them out - To hurt the companies that hire them (often more left leaning)
The republicans might be crying about it, but they have zero proof. Whereas they've literally given us their plan out loud of how they were going to cheat. And they followed through.
You might think that they have zero proof, but they're definitely doing their best to find something (https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1325124277503406080), although a lot can be explained without "cheating" (https://twitter.com/HayekAndKeynes/status/132519429924449075...).
(Also, witnessing the ceding of Hong Kong to China two decades ahead of schedule did make me appreciate the projection of soft power where USG had been keeping order without dropping bombs)
Perhaps I’m overly-cynical, but in my (limited) experience, most people just don’t pay enough attention for such motivations — or even expectations — to be plausible.
And you know this. And Joe Biden knew this when he made the same claim in one of the debates. It's gaslighting, and it bothers me that absolutely nobody called him out on it. Court packing is a red line that nobody should cross. I feel it's important that we all choose our words carefully so that it continues to stay off the table.
What actually happened was that large numbers of voters are stuck in a filter bubble and their only news sources were telling them the election was being stolen. So by supporting Trump they probably thought they were defending democracy.
Of course, those particular news stories were pure lies. But we should focus on the peddlers of lies more than those who were duped by them.