1,354 karma · joined January 25, 2018
It's the equivalent of calling a white guy a honkey in 2026 - cringe and not going to get the reaction you hope for unless doing it comedically.
Racial profiling for one. Also "citizen" and "natural born citizen" getting treated differently for another.
Negative partisanship is the major driver in most politics because, again, the State fails to provide for the citizens, without fail, in every system, if it would infringe upon the ability of the State to amass/maintain power. It's easier to say "at least I'm not that guy" as you trample on the populous, so we agree that everyone loves a scapegoat. I can do plenty of nuance, but you started at generalizations and I was refuting that first as that's all I have to go on here.
Some counter theories: People have fewer kids not because they drink less, but because children are extremely expensive, wage growth has been stagnant, women make up a larger share of the workplace (and don't want to lose their spot), and birth control is more readily available.
People are lonely because: women are capable of larger roles in the workforce and it's upended social expectations, therapy has caused people to avoid others that they deep destructive/negative in their lives, technology has caused us all to be alienated, or society has shifted but culture hasn't caught up to these changes (assuming they're lonely at all and not just experiencing the same existence previous generations did but now with constant news cycles and the ability to tap into 24/7 feeds of people having fun).
(is this the level of discourse we're going for here?)
But your comparison is wrong, because you can...elect to not use the service. You could pay less for less coverage (so like, buying food without paying for a delivery fee because you don't need the convenience). Also, the individual mandate was killed (sucking funding out of the whole program), so you could opt out of the service entirely.
Nobody is forcing you to have insurance (at a federal level).
See the difference there?
If you can't pay the wage you're required to then the whole house of cards starts coming down because now you can't create a large enough network to meet demand, which shrinks demand, which increases costs, which makes it accessible to fewer and fewer high paid consumers.
Like a lot of capitalism "it's better than starving to death in the streets" is the appeal of the job and nothing more. Anything else is a paid message brought to you by UberDoorHub.
IDK, maybe I'm a mushbrain but it seems like if someone said they're the chairman of the board, and you told them to their face "well it's not like you run the company..." they'd finish their drink and go talk to someone else for the rest of the night.
As I said somewhere else in this boondoggle of willful media illiteracy: the people who complain about "there's too much politics in my entertainment", to a person, actually mean "I don't like the point of view that's being expressed by this media". Entertaining isn't objective. People used to pack picnic lunches to go watch a lynching. The thought of that makes me want to puke, but I can't say those people weren't entertained. The thing is, I don't need to appeal to a vague majority without citation to support my thoughts. I can stand on my own statements without throwing in logic fallacies (or junk statistics, I really don't know what you were trying to do there) and accept that, to paraphrase PK Dick , reality cannot be perceived uniformly by all individuals and to pretend as such is folly.
The dictionary definition of “politics” (as in, what the word actually means) would support the statement that “everything is political” to be at worst a smidge hyperbolic. No motte, no bailey, no rhetorical fallacy.
Thing is, most art has ideology, it’s the weirdo reactionaries that try to pretend otherwise.
Again, I get it: you don't want to engage in the politics of the writing you like. That's fine. But you don't get to say the politics don't exist in the text.
I promise, the authors you speak of would not respect your analysis of their text (and you're probably fine with that) but your narrower point is...not worth making? Anyone can like or dislike whatever they want for whatever reasons they want, what they can't do is say "that red barn can't actually red because I hate red barns but I like that one, and my analysis is valid". I mean I guess a P.K Dick character could, but I don't think we're ready to have that discussion.
Sci-fi and Speculative fiction, are, always political. Just like how romance is always about love, and mysteries are always about solving a puzzle. You were responding to my point, so I get to set the terms of engagement. Thems the rules of discourse.
I'll just come out and say it, your ability to analyze texts really comes into question when you say CYBERPUNK (of ALL the subgenres) can be anything but political. Again, if you really only want "political" to mean "involving governments" and not the LITERAL definition of the word, I don't know how we can talk to each other because we're speaking different languages (or rather, using language in entirely different ways).
I have some terrible news for you about birth rates and what this would do to society.
>>until they remedy their income issues I'd like you to define "work", "necessary work for society to function", "low-skill jobs" and "value" (as it pertains to a human life). I have a feeling we have very different definitions and that leads us to very different conclusions about what people can do.
>>I think we're far from "people cannot move classes if they want to" as well. Probably because you're not a social scientist/sociologist! We're talking about the bottom quintile, and it's very hard to become part of the upper crust, and it's very hard to leave American poverty[1,2]. But yea, some guy working a blue collar job can probably have kids that have white collar jobs.
1- https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/has-class-mobil... 2- https://web.archive.org/web/20091003184000/http://www.americ...
Also, the idea that "there's politics in the source, but you can enjoy it without engaging with them" is sort of proving my Rage Against the Machine example from my original post (I picked the most overtly political band I could think of for the ad absurdum of it): Just because you don't CARE or agree with the politics, doesn't mean it's not there. I'm not saying you need to like, or engage with the politics in anything, but denying that they exist is...a political act!
As for your refutations of the people I picked, I didn't see you citing an example of a story Asimov had without politics/social commentary (the man was prolific and I haven't ready everything he wrote, I picked him because his best known works are Foundation and Robots series which are both very very political), if you felt The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids... (or Flow my Tears, or A Scanner Darkly) were just "being weird" and not political, again, I think we're just using different definitions of the word.
In H2G2, Adams says that Vogons, the galactic bureaucrats and face of the space government, make the 3rd worst poetry in the Universe. Now if one wanted to, one can make that a silly joke, or one could interpret that as people who are dedicated to maintaining the systems of government are the among least creative creatures in existence . And the weird thing is, somehow, even if one came to the 2nd conclusion, one could still think Adams wasn't making a political statement. Now why am I suddenly thinking about Claude...
As someone else pointed out: you’re complaining that some media is poorly written and other media is well written.
There are past and current examples of overtly opinionated shows that people love and message-less media that nobody cared about.
Define "inferior" I guess? If the goal is "ingest as much usable protein as your body needs" plants can do it at levels beyond whatever you're going for. Is this a cost value analysis situation? Is it about taste/texture/enjoyment?
*Lazy source: https://www.greatveganathletes.com/
Hit me up with some citations please, mine are below.
https://notice.co/c/impossiblefoods https://robinhood.com/us/en/stocks/BYND/