There is an entire spectrum of political views, a good example would be stories about incarceration and homelessness which result in fairly left swinging opinions and very little blaming of the people involved.
I do find the correlation between vaccine hesitancy and conservative political views interesting though.
Is a parent far-right for demanding high standards from drugs they put into their children, or a leftist for not just accepting big-pharma's word?
I personally saw a lot of people be ejected from "the left" because of questioning the medical response to Covid. Many different circumstance, but they'd all run into the mandatory acceptance of the message. Some had been vaccine "wary" before and remained that way, others were pro-vax but doubted the safety given its minimal testing time, etc. All of these people were your average west-coast hippy type and they're now being told they're allied with unite-the-right anti-jew stuff in the USA.
I can't wait until the new affiliations drop and we can ditch the legacy groupings.
Wouldn’t republicans believe more in ‘each to their own, survival of the fittest’ (I want the best for my children) where democrats would be more ‘value for everyone’ (I should get vaccinated regardless of risk to protect my neighbours)
I imagine the Christian religion is more popular with republicans, which if true is equally interesting given it would contradict the above assertions (love thy neighbour, etc)…
With only two parties I don't think the parties themselves are good proxies for the views of the people who end up voting for them.
I think generally most people would want 1) each to their own 3) success of the hardworking 3) equality for everyone. With only two parties for the whole political spectrum neither group is actually that distinct. Many people vote on the key issues that impact their day-to-day and so there's generally no real difference on issues that aren't in the news.
Anyways, being on the west coast I assume that most of the Americans I'm talking about are Dems, and in Canada, probably 'Liberals'. I think their (perfectly reasonable) hippy distrust of government and corporations makes them doubt the "benefits" meaning they had no reason to do it for neighbors either. (This was 2+y ago now, who knows where they are now.)
A community meeting I went to a few years ago spent twenty minutes or so discussing microwaved water, and if the venue used a microwave and whether some people were "safe to drink the tea", and went downhill from there in a science sense. Everyone was very eager to help but it wasn't a terribly well informed group.
This was really annoying because the reaction to Trump's casual mention of it injected virulent American politics into everything around the world. We should have been able to discuss this and other topics without Rep/Dem nonsense spilling over, but instead any discussion of covid became nearly verboten, with even simply statements of obvious fact being banned. (ie, we haven't yet checked the Wuhan lab to see if Covid did in fact leak from there.)
It's pretty surprising to see people on 'hacker'news so in favour of government surveillance/censorship.
In my opinion, that may be a fairly contrary-to-fact opinion to hold.
Take the contentious issue of transgender human rights, for example: the HN discussions that I’ve seen quite heavily tended towards right-wing principles of distrust of intellectuals [0] (vis-a-vis completely discounting readily available scientific information). I presume that much of the indignation towards trans topics also stems from a the right-wing principle of religious traditionalism [0].
Granted, that’s just based on my experiences in the comments. I’ve not done any sort of in-depth analysis to arrive at the above opinion.
Alternatively, perhaps the latest stage of right-wing politics could be defined as the replacement of democratic law-and-order with righteous authoritarianism, rendering the quote somewhat nonsensical, in my hypothetical opinion.
There's a weird form of "intellectual"ism going on these days.
I've gotten insanely mad pushback on my contention that we simply cannot know if Covid leaked from Wuhan. (Or, back in 2020 we couldn't - who knows where we're getting now.) It could be easy to show there was a leak, but would be almost impossible to show there wasn't. Note that I wasn't saying "we shouldn't take the vax" or anything, just the leak issue. Total rabid culture war.
Similarly, there's a huge push that "trans women are women" and that there's science for this, gender spectrum and so on, but there's no ability to look behind the curtain. The studies don't show what they purport to, and don't match the claims they're being used to defend. Nobody has attempted to show a midpoint on the sex spectrum, and even if they did - the argument has moved on and now trans is an issue of self-id that doesn't require any physical issue. Bring this up and you're "literally saying trans people shouldn't exist", etc.
In both cases there's no depth to the argument, despite that it apparently comes from the best scientific minds in the world - it claims to be a factual claim but when you ask to see the facts it becomes a purity issue where you're then shamed for not simply believing. I was told I was a Covid denier because of not simply accepting the no-lab-leak story.
> perhaps the latest stage of right-wing politics could be defined as the replacement of democratic law-and-order with righteous authoritarianism
One side makes "facts" a matter of righteousness and the other side simply eschews facts for their religion.
That’s the scary part - the facts are readily available, but so few take the time to understanthe current state of it. Instead, they argue from their armchair based on this-or-that principle of the day.
The science is still new, but has solid foundations. It might only be a matter of years before a genetic test for tendency towards “transgender” will be created.
Do you recognize that you're about five years behind in "the message"? Trans is purely self-id, to declare yourself trans in the "progressive" countries like NZ and Canada you don't need to even suggest that there's anything physical involved. Specifically you're even allowed to keep changing your identity, something that couldn't happen if trans had a physical nature. Also, you're allowed to claim non-binary but use the women's washroom without even explaining why this would be appropriate.
In Canada you'd be called a trans-medicalist, which theoretically is advocating conversion therapy - to talk people out of their felt experience of gender or gender identity. It's borderline 'hate speech'.
> The science is still new, but has solid foundations.
What is the contention? Not the evidence, just the premise?
Do you suggest that males, like William (Lia) Thomas and Boyd (Fallon Fox) Burton are no stronger than women the moment they transition or that they rapidly become female-like by taking estrogen and losing testosterone as a consequence of their genital surgeries?
In these studies, is Caster Semenya treated as female despite fathering a baby?
> That’s the scary part - the facts are readily available, but so few take the time to understan the current state of it.
What facts? Be specific. Because many studies in the subject area would have failed a second-year student recently in any other specialty. Specifically the small sample size and self-selected nature of the trans athletes who have a motive to sandbag and return worse times in order to "prove" that they belong in women's sports, etc.
If that isn't what you meant, then please list these good studies because the space is crowded with academically blessed nonsense.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/stop-using-phony...
My post (parent to yours) outlined enough problems with "studies" in general that I can't think you're seriously suggesting any of them except by inertia at this point. Trying to pick an accurate journal, by reputation, in a time of extreme cancelling doesn't work. Even if SciAm had any standards they couldn't have published a negative article about transition because they would literally receive death threats.
If you've got sources that say sex is a spectrum, they're simply wrong. Developmental sex disorders don't make a new sex. Males produce sperm, and females produce eggs. There's no third sex that produces spegg, or what have you.
All of these articles contradict basic, and observable, biology. If they were true we'd have discovered it long ago when people and animals couldn't breed in expected ways. It's one of those things that only academics, who've never set foot on a farm, could believe.
Further, most of those articles are literally attempted child murder to justify the fetishes of their adult authors. They say things like "puberty blockers are reversible" despite all evidence (and basic logic) showing that they are not. It's impossible to have performed a study on giving children puberty blockers (at regular puberty age, not earlier like in the cases of precocious puberty) because we weren't performing a standard procedure until recently which could be studied. Those authors are saying "things we've never tested, which have huge and systemic impacts on your body, have zero long-term consequences".
John Stewart tells us that children are not being given puberty blockers, but doctors are telling us they are - and in sufficient quantity to have studied their impact. Obviously one, or both, of these is a lie. The more you look into trans "science" the more you'll see none of it is even intellectually plausible, let alone the pinnacle of science as you implied.
What, did you leave your brain at home?
It sounds like you want me to walk you through the science?
How about you read the research and tell me what your questions are and then I will respond.
> If you've got sources that say sex is a spectrum, they're simply wrong.
Apparently you've never heard of people with intersex conditions.
> despite all evidence (and basic logic) showing that they are not
Sources?
Also, basic logic built upon faulty assumptions leads to faulty conclusions, no matter how correct your logic is or is not.
> children are not being given puberty blockers
Medical conditions that require puberty blockers are very rare and, at any given time, not every state has an individual with such a medical condition or such a treatment plan.
> The more you look into trans "science" the more you'll see none of it is even intellectually plausible
The more you write like that, the more you sound like a foolish human.
P.S.,
"Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called ‘Intelligentzia’ that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw, but encounters it in its easiest synthetic form—upon the printed page."
-Albert Einstein, Why War?, 1931
Unlikely, considering that when researchers control for homosexuality in their test subjects, the correlations with gender incongruence that were supposedly found in earlier research are no longer present.
Not even a billion dollars will convince them they're wrong though...
It might wake some of them up, though. Pardon the sheep, for they are asleep. Dreaming dreams of nightmare fences.
We all know that foreign interference is a genuine concern, however, an opinion that appears to be right of centre doesn't always equate to it being grown in a Russian troll farm.
Trolls win when people think they have to achieve purity of thought - to drive away anyone who believes wrong-think even at the cost of the forum itself. Triggering forums to play purity games and cull the insufficiently aligned is a troll victory.
That doesn't mean you should let politics bleed into every other thread, but in a politics thread just move past the idea of needing to censor people to win.
But all I see is disinformation, especially folks glued to cable news (they’re all profit centric with very sporadic integrity) that have never traveled outside the states, and have had no contact with a diverse, pluralistic society.
I see a lack of empathy for anyone that’s “different”.
I’ve watched our middle class get decimated by trickle down economics lies and blaming poor people for being poor.
I’ve watched the invention of healthcare for mass profit from Reagan’s presidency that’s made it nearly impossible for anyone to just relax.
I’ve watched college go from a Pell grant and a 10-hr/week job to the price of a house, also from Reagan’s presidency.
I’ve watch gun ownership rise to hundreds of millions sold including weapons that liquify human life and a party that can watch the outcome of child massacres and just look the other way.
I don’t need to sensor anyone. You can talk all you want. But I’m tired of the lies, the greed, the misogyny, and the hate.
I honestly don’t have a clue what non-liberals believe anymore. I can’t make sense of any of it.
Show me a conservative that actually cares about all of humanity and not just themselves.
> I’ve watch gun ownership rise to hundreds of millions sold including weapons that liquify human life and a party that can watch the outcome of child massacres and just look the other way.
I think this is a good example.
In Canada there was a mass shooting and the government responded with a huge list of firearms restrictions. Ammo, magazines, models of guns, etc. Like 1400+ restrictions.
But none of that would have impacted the guns the shooter had, which were all obtained illegally across the border. What it would have done is left even more country families without defense and made it easier for the shooter to go house to house. But it played well in the cities and was used to create an artificial lib/con divide in what is fundamentally a city/country issue.
None of the "don't ban guns" people I spoke to wanted anyone to get shot, but they didn't want laws that won't help. We know that the vast majority of guns used in crime are illegal and that they come from the USA, not via stolen legal guns, so no amount of legal firearms crackdown would impact their numbers.
If those restrictions were separately proposed when there wasn't a shooting some of them might have gotten some support, but when presented as a knee-jerk solution where they obviously wouldn't work there was a lot of pushback. Nobody wanted more shootings, especially the conservative side who had suffered in them, but they weren't willing to have their tragedy turned into a political defeat as well when it wouldn't even help.
> the misogyny
I'm pretty sure you mean abortion. I'm pro-choice and the bans scare me, but I see women getting shit on from both sides of the aisle.
Men are being put in women's prisons:
https://fairplayforwomen.com/campaigns/prisons/
Even if they're baby rapers:
https://torontosun.com/news/national/hunter-trans-killers-ba...
And when they abuse women, the female inmates face extended punishment for describing them as male:
https://insidetime.org/women-face-punishment-for-using-wrong...
Also sports:
And violent terrorism against peaceful protest:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/07/us/former-ncaa-swimmer-riley-...
Both sides of the Dem/Rep fight are absolutely abusing women and women's rights, and while they're fighting against the other's excesses it's generally not to help women but to score points.