49 karma · joined September 12, 2016
With regards to omeprazole, I changed my diet a bit and no longer needed the omeprazole. I don't know exactly what it was, but if you can get off of a drug because you don't need it anymore that seems ideal.
I don't think this is quite true, it may have ended it faster, but I don't think it would still exist today if the civil war had not happened. Most other countries ended slavery without a violent civil war, especially if you think about the way technology vastly outweighed the usefulness of having slaves.
And then when Charlie Kirk says "Some deaths were worth it...", he is talking about accidents and abuses of guns by shooters. He doesn't mean that violence is the answer to politics, it would be great if nobody died from mass shootings. But he is saying that having the right to bear arms to defend yourself is preferable to the alternative where you have no right to do that.
I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.
The solution is to not use the internet if you care about your privacy.
Since WW2 we have had a growing unelected federal bureaucracy (staffed by college graduates more and more left-leaning), that is controlled by congress as you mentioned. Congress is run by seniority, most are re-elected every year and are elected along party lines without much thought. And most legislation is written by lobbyists and activists. People are apathetic about congress, there is not much democracy there. People care much more about the presidential election.
I think if you look at the actions of our federal government over past decades you will see it has not been very good for the health of the American people. I think any action by a president to take back some power from Congress to upend that order is a good thing. Throughout our history certain presidents have completely changed the federal government during their terms in office, and afterwards the title goes back to more complacent presidents. Over time systems decay and you may need to start with something new.
I think the internet was great initially for countering this 1984ness, but everyone joining and advocates for censorship have undone that in some ways. People get lost in the distraction of the internet. My hope is that eventually some portion of young people will turn away from social media and organize outside of that space.
If someone makes a threat on a person or groups life online, or doing something illegal, then I agree it shouldn’t be allowed. But censorship today goes far beyond that.
The purpose of the platform matters. MSN chats (group chats?) and sub-reddits are smaller places presumably set up by another user for a specific purpose. I have no problem with people being banned/censored for whatever reason from these smaller forums.
I have an issue with censorship when the platform is generic, not dedicated to a particular topic or group, like Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit as a whole. When one or more dominant third party platforms censor the same people, it has an effect similar to that of government censorship.
I also think the censorship will backfire, because by being shut down, it gives power to the ideas being censored. “There must be a reason they are shutting down discussion. They have no real answer to it!”
I agree that online harassment is ugly, but I still believe in absolute free speech on these generic platforms. The best solution to all of this would be to have block lists that people could opt-in or out of. Don’t want to see something? Subscribe to the block list.
If these platforms had started out censoring particular political content, they would not have had the same mass adoption, or there may have been more free-speech competitors.
Regarding the psychopath comment, it seems like many more Ukrainians (and Russians) would be alive today if the US had not sent military aid to drag out the war.
You can argue that the invasion shouldn't have happened in the first place, but these geopolitical events happen for real reasons. Whether we think them just or not in our country, I think we have a duty to consider these and try to keep the peace and save human life, and not antagonize other countries for ideological or corrupt reasons.