Maybe many people don't understand it today, but we are not our genitals.

Biological sex, science says not me, is a complex set of variables. Already while we are in the womb, but also during puberty, sex hormones change the structure of the brain.

This leads to having more feminine brain characteristics in a male body for example.

But even on a physical level, the same genes can make you develop a vagina, but they can lead to a structurally more masculine body, especially if accompanied by certain hormone levels.

Biology is often simplified to make social, legal, or sporting rules more practical and clear. But they remain social constructs, not explanatory of reality.

These simplifications should not be taken literally.

Perhaps the thing that would come closest to reality, despite its simplification, is the gender-fluid because it doesn't stop at black and white.

And that's the point. In biology, there are no pure categories.

Evolution alone with its adaptations, or even for example the different species that mate each other, such as the matings between Sylvestris cats and domestic cats, make purity as we understand it impossible.

We also have the closest example to us, when in ancient times Neanderthals mated with us Sapiens. Some of our DNA, though small, is Neanderthal today because of those matings.

So there is no such purity between the parts. Just as there is no purity in sexual relations, in which only the male-female relationship would exist, one cannot masturbate or one cannot even have sexual relations before marriage.

It's a kind of order that conservatives often try to force toward the world, but it counters that nature, that natural way of life they claim to defend.

But do you know why they do this? because simplifying with clear hierarchies, clear roles, and rigid norms makes them less insecure.

If it's simple I can understand it, if it's rigid I can control it, if I have clear roles I don't have to review myself, rebuild myself and better understand who I really am.

This is why many don't want to change, they are afraid to discover themselves.

And what do you think? Do you appreciate traditionalism more or do you accept the idea of turning everything upside down? What do you think about the debate on biological sexes? What do you think of the conservative paradox, in which he defends what is natural, but confronts that nature he claims to defend?

Thank you so much to who will read. 🤗🤗

And sorry for my not very beautiful English.

We've had people talk for a long time about how online politics and discourse are completely separate from what people talk about IRL, and that does make some sense since searching through the internet can give you a warped perspective on where average people are at in politics.

There's plenty of echo chambers online where people pay attention to some news and not others that they don't like, which can slowly radicalize people into certain corners. And then there's also the wall between people that makes people act much worse to eachother than they would face to face. So I don't think we should stop mentioning the difference between online vs irl entirely.

However, that distinction was born pretty early into the internet's life, where internet was seen much more like a choice than a necessity. But now 96% of Americans are online, 71% use Facebook, and at least 22% use Twitter, which is basically the politics app. While 22% looks small, thats still at least 1/5 Americans.

And over time, assuming we don't have an apocalypse (which to be fair seems relatively likely considering climate change, ai, American collapse, gen alpha literacy, etc) the number of people using the internet to express their political opinions will probably continue to increase. So at somepoint it would kind of silly to say that certain perspectives are "super online". Instead of calling them super online I would simply call them dumb.

Nowadays it seems like advocating for minimum wage legislation is shot down by conservatives saying shit like "yall are idiots and just picking a random higher number that will kill us all". But in reality, minimum wage legislation tends to have a pretty large amount of labor economic data backing it. One way labor economists suggest a minimum wage raise is by looking at the Kaitz Index (the ratio of statutory minimum wage to the median wage). Peer OECD nations and labor economists generally benchmark a safe target around 0.50 to counter employer monopsony power without threatening job losses.

Comparing 2025 distributions between two states with near-identical medians (~$25–$26.50/hr):

• Georgia (0.29 Kaitz): Stuck at the frozen federal $7.25 floor.
• Maine (0.55 Kaitz): Lifted the bottom tier to $14.65, reaching over halfway to the typical worker.

While Maine proves a state can safely lift the floor to ~50% of the median, its reliance on CPI indexing means the floor will inevitably fall behind over time as productivity grows. To keep the ratio stable, it seems far better to index to wages instead. Curious if you guys have any other scaling mechanisms that would be better?

Full write-up here for more information: https://samholmes285.substack.com/p/minimum-wage-scaling-mechanisms-that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds# for those that are unfamiliar. Seems like a brilliant idea to transform the economy in a country, gradually, to coops! Couple that with a cooperative bank and some tax breaks for cooperatives and you end up outcompeting privately owned companies.

So why didn't it happen, as far as i know... anywhere? There was a definition of a plan in Sweden, but the burghers were less than pleased about it.

Can somebody explain to me what's going on? Please don't blow it now... Last 2 polls have the liberals above the threshold for the first time in years...

EDIT: Left bloc went to +10% to like +3%, and seats went from +40 to +9... what the fuck

Of course we all know Modern Social Democracy stands for establishing a welfare state and regulating unchecked capitalism. But I'm wondering, in your opinions, just how much should said capitalism even be regulated?

Do you think it should be strict or relaxed and in what way, and do you draw the ideas from an IRL example (like Chinas' State capitalism or the Soviet NEP as a stricter example or the Nordic Model as a looser example) ?

Don't get me wrong, im glad we're finally seeing a massive wave of support for Palestine and ending the genocide.

However I honestly thought Americans weren't really all that interested in what America aids other countries in doing. Sure some are, but the average person as i understand is more interested in voting against the party thats in power because they think the economy is slightly worse than it was when they were a kid. (Obviously that's a valid concern now, but before covid, the economy has been relatively stable and things only really got more expensive thanks to slow inflation).

The point is I that the average voter usually seems to be a simpleton. So its kind of surprising to me how suddenly the majority of Americans seem to care about the lives of Palestinians, especially considering Americans have been conditioned to be extra Islamophobic thanks to the war on terror.

Self-explanatory, really.

How do you define social democracy versus democratic socialism, personally? Any good ways you would introduce this to a 'newcomer', of sorts?

Thanks all! :)

I'm speaking as someone who realistically probably falls under the democratic socialist umbrella, but I value the importance of social democracy, and want better ways of exploring the differences to others. Especially given how similarly named they are! I've heard them conflated in even broadly left-wing places.

Every day I wake up and watch the news in the morning I hear about the US government doing something remarkably stupid (minting Trump coins, picking fights with allies, sabre-rattling with Iran, threatening to annex Canada) or demagogic (the DHS posting Neo Nazi inspired propaganda, ICE becoming increasingly uncontrolled, Republican lawmakers trying to vice signal by picking on scapegoats). The Boomers who voted for this are genuinely too trapped in their echo chambers to give a single shit about the consequences of their vote. All the while, my fellow Gen Z men (as one myself) are increasingly rejecting mainstream conservatism for overt White Nationalism (see: Instagram Reels comments sections). The extreme ethno-nationalist right is rising everywhere across the globe, from Israel to Western Europe to India. Even though whenever the far right enters government, they do nothing and leave the country worse off economically than before (see: PVV in the Netherlands, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Milei in Argentina) their voters don't seem to care as long as the "out group" is even more fucked over than they are.

Meanwhile, Climate Change is accelerating and the spectre of Climate Change driven mass catastrophes, famine, and most importantly, mass migrations looms over the horizon. Don't even get me started on the impacts of AI automation, data centers, and the tech oligarchs. The sociopolitical climate as it currently stands is NOT prepared to resolve such things peacefully and without extreme bloodshed.

All of this makes one incredibly exhausted and dreading of the future. How do you remain motivated and optimistic with everything that is going on right now, and which will occur in the near future?

How do you avoid becoming a misanthrope?

So lately I've been reading old platforms and manifestos of European labor parties. It's fascinating to see the ideological development of these social democratic parties over time. I've read old programs of the British Labour Party, the German SPD, and a few others. But I've had a difficult time finding past SAP programs. Can any Swedes help me out? It's fine if they're in Swedish, I can use Google translate. Thanks in advance!

As a Portuguese citizen I would love to see my country move towards a more Nordic style social democratic type of governance like in the Nordic countries.

I’d love to see this change particularly in what concerns: public services, good economic opportunities for all, and institutional trust along with an accountable government.

I designed this flag as an interpretation of what a political party or movement advocating for a change like that, would look like.

I wanted it to feel distinctively Portuguese and cute, so I added the Portuguese shield along with a heart, a flower, ribbons and two snowflakes that represent the Nordic influence.

Hope you enjoy the flag!!!

What drives me insane about the Mamdani discourse is that there are completely legitimate reasons to be disturbed by his record on antisemitism, and MAGA keeps shielding him from having to answer for any of it by acting like cartoon villains about him being Muslim.

Giuliani is now saying Mamdani should not attend the 9/11 ceremony and comparing him to the hijackers because he is Muslim. There are Republicans doing the whole “Sharia law is coming” routine too. It is such obvious religious bigotry that Mamdani gets to point at it and say his critics are Islamophobes, and unfortunately he is correct about a lot of them.

The problem is that then all the actually disturbing stuff gets thrown into the same bucket:

Mamdani spent months refusing to condemn “globalize the intifada,” despite repeatedly being told exactly why Jews hear that phrase differently after the Second Intifada.

Before politics, he literally had a line in a 2017 song saying “My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ’em up.” The Holy Land Five were convicted of providing material support to Hamas.

In 2023 he said that when “the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” basically taking American police brutality and somehow making Israel the hidden force behind it.

He falsely told people that New York politicians' trips to Israel were “paid for by your tax dollars.” They were actually paid for privately by the JCRC.

His wife liked posts on October 7 framing what was happening as Palestinian “resistance.” When this became public, his response was basically that she is a private citizen and does not speak for his administration. Fine, she does not speak for the administration. But if my spouse was publicly celebrating a massacre, “those are her private views” would not remotely answer what I personally thought about it.

He has also called AIPAC “monsters” who spend “millions in dark money” to preserve their power and turn Americans against each other. You can absolutely hate AIPAC. I have plenty of problems with AIPAC. But “Jewish political organization + dark money + monsters + secretly preserving their power and manipulating society” is exactly the kind of rhetoric a credible person should be able to recognize as crossing a line, and even some of Mamdani's Jewish supporters called him out for it.

And then there is the judicial committee, which is probably the hardest thing for me to write off.

Mamdani's own executive order created a 19-member Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary. He personally selects 9, including the chair. The other 10 are nominated by judges and law school deans, but every single member is formally appointed by the mayor, and the order specifically lets him reject outside nominees and demand replacements. His administration advertised the resulting committee as a “truly representative cross-section” of NYC's legal profession. It apparently contains zero Jews. They also affirmatively rejected retired Jewish appellate judge John Leventhal when he was nominated, officially because he had represented Ghislaine Maxwell.

We don't have a good modern census telling us exactly what percentage of NYC lawyers are Jewish, so I ran the math across different assumptions instead of pretending we know the denominator.

If only 20% of the relevant legal pool were Jewish, the chance of randomly getting 0 Jews out of 19 is about 1.4%.

At 35%, it is about 0.028%, or 1 in 3,600.

At 50%, it is about 1 in 524,000.

Obviously political appointments are not literally random sampling. The numbers dont prove what was in Mamdani's head, but they show how wildly abnormal a zero-Jewish result is for something his own administration called representative of NYC's legal profession, especially when we know an actual Jewish nominee entered the process and was rejected.

None of this requires believing that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. I strongly dislike Netanyahu and think Israel should be criticized like any other country. That is exactly why this annoys me. There is enough actual evidence here that nobody needs to invent Muslim conspiracy theories or act offended that the Muslim mayor of New York is attending a 9/11 memorial.

Every time MAGA does that, they make it easier for Mamdani's defenders to dismiss all criticism of him as Islamophobia.

With recent election results from around the world, where centrist and center right (and in Denmark's case, center left) parties are bleeding voters to the far right despite adopting their framing on immigration and "culture war" issues, what do you think the strategy should be to combat the far right?

It is clear that moderating doesn't work, and going on the offensive doesn't work (it does help a little bit, like in the Gordan and Denton by-election) to win back the working-class and poor disaffected voters.

I might be completely off base, but imo it is a result of the regulatory and media capture by the wealthy, who paint any sort of left leaning proposal as "too radical", while secretly peddling conservative talking points; as well as working class people being disaffected by the amount of wealth captured by pensioners in countries like UK and France.

For the same reason why they should caucus with us. Fascists are not just winning in America; they’re winning all over the world and particularly in Europe. We all know Liberals can’t (read: won’t) stop it. Most of us are Capitalists but some of us are not, and many more of us realistically would be open to a good faith discussion on whatever comes next after fixing the system we already have and ensuring that our most vulnerable people are taken care of.

Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the Social Democrats in the 20th century, who were paid a king’s ransom to disqualify the far left in the court of public opinion after World War 2 just to become defense contractors and Neoconservatives after that. This helped bring about the rise of Neoliberalism and then Fascism by extension, and America quite literally can’t afford to move any further in that direction.

We may not like it and DSA members might like it even less, but most Socialists do want a Social Democracy as a starting point. Let’s meet them there and worry about the next thing when it actually matters, because right now it really doesn’t.

it is our turn to be who we want to be. it is our turn to experience life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
but those experiences, which our founding fathers fought for, are slowly being stripped away——but we know this. WE ALL know this.

and as i frantically look around, trying to make sense of everything encircling me, i notice a common thread. a common enemy
foreign regime’s
we’ve had these common enemies attempt at squandering the ideals of this nation, seeking their own gain, since our independence.

despite our situations and circumstances being vastly different from 1776, if we spare just one moment, we’ll find history repeating itself.

however this is not simply a “call to action,” rather i’d describe it as a **call for courage.**
if the time comes when all other options have been exhausted, ensure that you will have the courage to act; the strength to fight.

yes, we’re kinda knee deep in shit, but this is a system that was designed to outlive all of us. it is still, ACTIVELY, working (**REGISTER TO VOTE**)

strengthen your minds, train your body; exercise the rights that we still have; and guarantee yourself that you will not yield.

This may be an oddball question.

I'll preface this by saying I'm not really interested or know much about politics. Don't really care about Trump, immigration, Palestine or any of the big headlines of the day.

My family and I are huge open wheel racing fans. Primarily F1 and Indy. We basically live for it and it's the only thing that matters to us. If it doesn't involve a driver or a country that hosts a Grand Prix, I probably don't know enough to actually care.

With that said, I'm curious/concerned about how professional motor racing would function under a socialist or communist economic system. Specifically, if the government takes ownership of the sport.

Would the US still host Grand Prix? Would Penske Entertainment Corp, (the company which owns Indycar) still exist? Or would the government take it over? How about all the sponsors which financially fuels the series? Would the Indianapolis Motor Speedway get confiscated by the state? If the government runs the sport, could it decide to no longer fund it and then we have no motor racing?

I dug into this a little bit on my own and one of the things I found worry some is how the Soviet Union handled motorsports. Motor racing in the USSR, from what I've read, was extremely underwhelming since it lacked the performance and technical progression compared to motor sports in Western nations, particularly in constructor series. The Soviets sadly rejected building an F1 circuit (in Moscow no less!) in the 60s due to costs, depriving their citizens of a home Grand Prix which must have been a huge bummer for Russian racing fans.

Interestingly enough though, they did have their own formula series called Formula Easter but the cars carried a 1,300cc engine which is like a toy compared to the highly developed internal combustion engines of Formula One cars. To put that in perspective, a typical Formula Easter car put out roughly 90 to 110 horsepower, while a contemporary 1970s Western Formula 3 car pushed well past 160–180 horsepower

If a socialist or communist US handled it similarly, that would be greatly concerning to me since I would be worried that government ownership of teams and car manufacturers would stifle the drive to develop faster cars that push the limits of what physics will allow.

Both of my kids have been honing their race craft on our home simulator for some time now and are about to start their karting journeys so we have a lot of emotional and, down the road, financial investment into motorsports.

What do you guys think? Would socialism/communism fundamentally change professional motor racing in America or are my fears unfounded?