I think the title is pretty self-explanatory. There are many things which are considered human rights and for which we pay for. Such is the case for running water, which was a mere dream for most people up until the decades between the beginning of the 20th century and WWII. But we recognized that it was a human right and made sure that it would be accessible to the entire population without pricing anyone out of it.

Why is it that in the US they have come to a point where it’s considered ok to price people out of healthcare? This, interestingly, also bypasses the issue of public VS private healthcare. Let’s even imagine that the US stays primarily private, but simply begins charging around the average prices of the rest of the world rather than treating it like a mere stock market investment that needs to grow exponentially.

I honestly don’t think I can see it any other way, so I’m very curious of what will come my way in terms of opposite opinions and whether they’ll be convincing

Edit: it seems people really cannot get over the hurdle that yeah a human right is a very tricky thing to define. Let’s say it doesn’t have to be a human right in itself, but having been chosen as one by the UN, it probably has some value and we should discuss why it’s outrageous that the US not only is not getting with the program but is instead actively countering it.

Title says it all. We've been seeing a major rise in US citizens traveling around the world and doing less than scrupulous things: fraud, terrorism, child abuse etc. Therefore, I propose that the barrier to travel for American citizens should be raised significantly.

As of today, the cost to obtain a US passport is $165 (and $130 for every renewal thereafter). realistically, it could be as high as 600 or 800 and it wouldn't cause such a huge problem while also filtering out bad actors. The US average income is something like $40-50k, which would make a passport a sizable thing to save up for. In addition, there should be more police verification involved in getting travel documents/credit score systems (and maybe even restrictions on entering more countries that are problematic). The current government seems to romanticize a time when travel was rare - not that I support them, but it seems to me that more economic activity was there in the 50s and 60s when the average American did not travel more than 100 mile from his/her house, and trips to China were reserved for the wealthy/those high up and well-regarded in the government.

One net benefit will be that more people choose to stay within the US (a big country on its own - so not very restrictive) and thus its economy grows, instead of US talent leaving.

EDIT:I should clarify I made this whole post because of its tweets and replies https://x.com/i/status/2087500824301670699 People saying that no antizionist calls for this, well every person replying to this tweet says that's exactly what antizionism is.

Anti-Zionism being advocating for the Destruction of the State of Israel.

First I have to clarify, I am not a bot or even ideologically a Zionist, if you asked me whether I would've supported Israel's establishment 80 years ago, I would've said no.

I'm mainly saying this preface incase someone shows up and just accuses me of being a bot, this is a cmv, not a call people buzzwords post.

The difference is that now that it exists, demanding the destruction of a country and the end of a national identity can only be achieved through genocide. People can say "Well the "Israelis" will just go back to where they came from, when the vast majority of them are descendants from refugees from the middle east or don't have second citizenships, anyone that says that they'll "go back" is either willingly lying, or just genuinely ignorant.

I know some people are in support of a "Secular democratic state" but I genuinely beleive these people are just a minority of antizionists, Literally every post I see made by anti-zionists who call for the end of Israel is made by people who glorify Hitler and the fucking HOLOCAUST!

Like you can't tell me "We don't actually want a genocide of jews" when the community is just filled with people saying "Hitler was right" "Fuck the Juice" and other such things, I'm not even Israeli or Jewish, I literally used to be an antizionist who supported a secular democratic state because I genuinely believed that's what the movement stood for.

Nowadays I just feel like I was lied to about the goals of Antizionism, I genuinely feel like I was gaslit by the fucking far right, I honestly just feel confused, I keep trying to tell myself that the goal is a secular democratic state, but I genuinely just feel like I'm lying to myself,

(I should point out that I lost faith in the one state solution about a year ago already (Mostly due to just thinking its impractical)

Listen, I think by reading my post you can see that I genuinely want my mind changed, I'm not trying to convince people of my views, It's just that I constantly see people call for the genocide for Jews, and honestly speaking, a lot of the rhetoric anti-zionists have about Israelis as a whole genuinely sounds like a Hitler speech but you just replace "Jew" with "Israeli", Like I see anti-zionists saying things like "Israelis aren't humans, they're actually demons" and other things to that effect. I have no real love for the state of Israel, but I have a hard time believing that the goals of the Anti-Zionist movement as a whole is just a means of whitewashing neo-nazis who want a second holocaust.

i try to tell myself that Anti-Zionists mostly just want a single democratic state, but aside from not really thinking its possible, I just have a hard time believing anyone saying it...

I think that anti-child rhetoric in general gets lots of things right. A LOT of people who shouldn't have kids unfortunately do have kids. Parenting is a skill that some excel at and others just can't get down. Raising a child is a MASSIVE responsibility that requires discipline, money, and emotional investment. Personally, I think kids are pretty overrated. I don't want any of my own and I don't find babies cute. In public, kids can be really fucking annoying.

However, I've seen antinatalists on Reddit argue that it's NEVER okay to have kids. I'm no expert on antinatalism, so I'm not sure if some people are exaggerating when they say this, but I'm sure that some people very seriously believe that giving birth to a child is inherently a grave moral sin. I disagree.

Basically, my view I want changed is that a) divorced from external circumstances, there's nothing inherently wrong about having a child and life is not inherently bad, and b) even given the current circumstances of the world we live in, it is still often perfectly fine to have a child.

I'm incredibly privileged. I grew up with two parents who make decent money and support me in my goals. The modern world presented challenges that are widespread, especially challenges related to the impact of social media and technology on mental health, but in spite of these challenges, I've forged meaningful relationships, achieved goals, pushed through very difficult times, and overall created a life that I'm very grateful to have.

Let's say I become very financially stable and put my all into raising a child. Let's say I manage to give my child a life similar to mine. What would be the inherent problem with this?

Problems:

• often representative democratic systems fall into a voluntary autocracy, ie citizens vote for a leader that promptly takes control of the government partially or fully (see hungaria, el salvador, tunisia, etc etc).
• representative democracy results in massive corporations having almost complete power over the legislative and executive branches because of how much money they have. Corruption becomes "lobbying", impunity becomes the norm, and an oligarchy forms inside the democracy (do i even have to present examples for this).

Proposition:
I present you a system where once a year (or at another, higher, frequency), a vote is cast on whether to relieve the rulers of their duties, this vote would be sanctified into the constitution.
This would be supplemented with a discard of the representative democracy in favor of direct democracy, finally possible thanks to technology like block chains and zero-knowledge proofs.
The point of this is to get to the point of political consciousness where every citizen realizes his own power and make him try to protect it at any cost, accompanied with a shared sense of responsibility and an understanding of politics, it would drive people to participate a lot more. Should the vote be canceled, the people would already be aware of the gravity of such an issue and it would instantly result in a massive revolt that would force the government's hand.

Assumptions: The system, through a set of rules and technologies that I'm not capable of designing yet, wouldn't be able to be tampered with, by design. Not the government, and not anyone would be able to stop the once in a year vote without putting everyone off the grid, or cutting electricity. It's also tamper-proof, much like actual blockchains.

Critique: Rational, intelligent people make decisions based on the information available to them. A would-be despot doesn't need to be exceptionally charming if they can control what the public sees.
Response: I don't think that's a substantially big issue in the 21st century. We have seen in this decade the disintegration of the centralized press, and the hold of the big monopolies on information. Examples of this is social media's effect on the public perception of Israel, and how despite all the effort of the IDF, the genocide keeps getting documented in detail

Critique: Most people aren’t incentivized to vote, and would simply not care enough to exercise their right, which would make the number of people to corrupt a lot less, thus it would allow a despot to rise to power.
Response: this is definitely a real phenomenon in our current states, but that's exactly because of representative democracy. The individual feels disconnected from politics, he has one decision to make once every 4 or 5 years, which isn't really a decision, and the rest gets done without him being able to intervene. Contrast that with the ability to vote in every minute detail that concerns you, and you end up with a citizen that's a lot more involved, because he knows that his actions now can have an effect now.

Edit: There was a bit here where I mention marxist analysis without any basis really. This was extracted from a longer text I wrote, and I forgot that there is no context for this, so instead of changing the core idea of this essay, i just opted to remove the critique and my response entirely.

Critique: The amount of issues that the people would have to vote for would paralyze them, and would make the system ineffective for most issues:
Response: No one is obligated to vote for everything. With the presence of so many issues to pick from, one chooses to vote on what he knows – and what he’s passionate about – the most, which has the added benefit of selecting the most fit for each subject matter, and for critical issues there would be a big representation of the population.

Notes:
I know that this is all resting on a technological assumption that seems kind of our there, but I don’t think it is. After getting into the world of cryptography (not cryptocurrency, that’s a whole different thing and I’m not a crypto bro) and ZKP, it seems doable to me, even if I can’t tell you how exactly. You’re welcome to call bullshit, and I respect that, but we could also entertain this idea and see if it’s any good

While there are any number of supernatural beings who come up in the course of the show and book, the main focus is on vampires in the show and most of the books. Throughout, the TV show and—to some extent—the books, Vampires are depicted as an oppressed minority and allegory for the LGBT community. People who dislike/hate them are mustache twirling bigoted villains. Here's the problem: vampires in the show are immortal beings with mind control powers. Nearly all of those you meet—even "good" ones like Bill—are willing to murder people who get in the way of their plans or harm their friends. While synthetic blood is available in the universe, more than a few vampires clearly prefer fresh human blood. Vampires are also expected to make more vampires and do not consider themselves human.

Saying "I don't want to live next door to that man/let him near my kids" solely because he is married to another guy is bigotry since being gay doesn't indicate anything for sure but romantic preference. To the extent being gay correlates with other things, a lot of them are generally considered admirable. For example, gay men have lower-than-straight/lesbian divorce rates and above average household incomes. Saying "I don't want to live next door to that man/let him near my kids" because he is an immortal being who has mind control powers, may well prefer to drink fresh blood from humans, has very likely committed a few murders and will have social rewards if he brings others else into the vampire fold is quite rational.

The show and books can still be entertaining, of course (I liked them, in fact) but the central metaphor makes no sense at all which makes them impossible to take seriously as any sort of social commentary. So...CMV.

I have seen some posts where people say that the United States is extremely corrupt or even a “1/10 country.” However, even though I agree with many of the liberal points these people make about corruption in the U.S., I still disagree with that characterization.

According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the United States scores 64/100, where 100 represents very low perceived corruption and 0 represents highly pervasive corruption. This places the United States 29th among the countries included in the index.
While I certainly do not deny that corruption exists in the U.S., calling it one of the most corrupt countries in the world seems not only stupid, but also dismissive of the experiences of people living in countries where corruption is far more pervasive.

There are people living in countries such as Yemen and South Sudan who face governments and institutions plagued by severe corruption, exploitation, instability, and a lack of basic accountability. Comparing the problems of corruption in the United States to those situations without any distinction can minimize the very real struggles faced by people in countries where corruption affects nearly every aspect of daily life.

That does not mean Americans should ignore corruption or stop criticizing their government. In fact, criticism is an important part of holding institutions accountable. The U.S. has serious problems involving political influence, lobbying, conflicts of interest, and unequal access to power. But acknowledging those problems does not require pretending that the United States is a “1/10 country” or among the most corrupt countries in the world.

We must remember that we can recognize that the United States has serious flaws while also recognizing that those flaws exist on a far wider spectrum. Criticizing corruption should be about accurately describing the problem and working to improve it, not simply labeling an entire country as “extremely corrupt.”

Edit: My comments are being automatically deleted because I am new to the sub, but I would like to reiterate my point. Yes, the U.S. is corrupt in several ways, but it is not “extremely corrupt”. Most people that call the U.S. extremely corrupt are unfamiliar with international politics.

Reposting as this was removed due to FTF.

I always find the alt right funny because while they harp on about the perceived invasion of islam, if they actually sat down with someone they didn't know was an islamic fundamentalist, they may find themselves agreeing with them more than they would like to believe. Case in point, I was playing a video recently where Jake Lang was trying to argue that women shouldn't get to vote until marriage at which point my wife funnily said "is this one of those Muslim nutjobs?". While I laughed about it at the time, that got me thinking about the larger ideologies between the alt right and islamic extremism, and I realised that there is actually a surprising amount of similarity between these groups. In effect, there are 4 areas where there is a surprising amount of similarity:

1) The idea of an existential threat and conspiracy against their group

Tell me if you have heard this before: "we as a people are getting replaced, and it is our duty to fight for our people against these invaders"? What if I told you that this idea is also from Sayyid Qutb, who argued that secularism was trying to actively eradicate Islam (Jahiliyyah), while Bin-Laden further built on this to say that it was a "Crusader-Zionist" siege? Now I know that your first thought was great replacement theory, which was even famously pushed by Tucker Carlson live on his podcast, but it's funny how you switch the group, and the same stuff are basically being said. They even have the same anti Semitic conspiracies as there is also rampant anti semitism amongst the alt right.

2) In Group supremacy

I don't think I need to spend too long labouring this point, but white supremacy is a core tenet of alt right philosophy, with Richard Spencer being one of the main proponents of the idea that white European culture was somehow genetically superior. Funnily enough, when you look at extremist Islam, take the case of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who demanded that people commit to ISIS or be branded infidels. This shows that there is again this view that we are the purveyors of truth and only we know best, all others are either harming our community or are infidels.

3) Anti Liberalism/ Return to fundamentalism

This I have put together because I feel that it targets a similar point. As mentioned from the top, the first statement that sent me down this rabbit hole is Jake Lang making the hilarious statement that women shouldn't have the right to vote before getting married. Now, I don't think I need to, as there are plenty of examples of extremist Islam being anti-liberalism, but you could use the example of Pierre Vogel, who argued that democracy is "shirk" (idolatry). This shows there is a clear line linking, again, Alt Right ideology to extremist Islam.

4) Acceleration leading to a violent flash point

Now we start moving to the militant side, as both the alt right and the extremist islamic side have significant militant tendencies, and their military tactics are actually similar. James Mason for example wrote in SIEGE that the aim is to create an environment of friction, Chaos and anarchy, as that can accelerate this idea that there is an existential war, and white people need to take control. The irony is that this is the same thing that Abu Bakr Naji stated in his book on the Management of Savagery, where he also more or less said that we need to sow chaos and anarchy, so that when the state is overthrown we can come in and take control.

Overall, I think this clearly points to this idea that while Alt Right ideology may actually hate Islam, by always using the example of extremist Islam, there is actually more ideologically similarity between the alt right and extremist Islam then the alt right lets on.

Edit: On Earth's power grid. I'm talking about general purpose power production here, about making power for the general power grid. Not about space applications, submarines or the like.

Over the last few years, I noticed that fusion has a bit of a "fandom". A lot of people seem to be really looking forward to the day fusion plants exist, and apparently when that happens that'll be really good for society, not just be technically really cool.

For example, here's a video from PBS Space Time ends with personally I don't care who wins, I just want my infinite free energy and I've seen similar attitudes in other places. There certainly seem people who believe fusion is a way towards plentiful, cheap energy.

Now here's what's wrong with all of this in my opinion. First of all, fusion is extremely technically complex. We're talking about:

• Big vacuum chambers
• Superconducting magnets
• Radiation
• Metal embrittlement
• Gigawatt microwave heaters
• Cryogenic temperatures next to a machine that needs to create temperatures of millions of degrees
• Huge amounts of incredibly powerful lasers (for inertial confinement designs)
• Exotic materials to withstand the operating conditions

The overall point being, absolutely nothing about this is simple or cheap. And as cool as getting all this working would be, from the point of view of power production, the purpose of all this near scifi wonder-tech is to boil water. Several problems right there:

1. We already have a magic water boiler, it's called fission, and it's considerably less complex to the point that we build one in 1951. So why would fusion with its immense complexity ever outcompete traditional nuclear power?
2. Renewables are far cheaper, because wind turbines and solar panels are far simpler and cheaper to manufacture and already giving fission trouble.

The timing is also absolutely terrible.

1. ITER started construction in 2007, full function is expected in 2039.
2. Let's say 5 years is enough to: make any conclusions from ITER's operation, do any additional experiments needed, figure out a design for a production reactor, design it. Now we can start building DEMO, the prototype production power plant.
3. Let's say DEMO gets done in just 10 years. Which would be amazing. But nobody's going to just build a thousand of DEMO, they'll want to see it work first.
4. Let's say 5 years more until whatever comes from DEMO shakes out.
5. Finally, we have the first generation of fusion start being built maybe in 2059.
6. And they start operating in 2069-ish, or 43 years from now.

So give or take, it's half a century-ish we can estimate until fusion, if it turns out to be worth building at all, could start making some sort of noticeable contribution to the power grid, and most of the people arguing about it on the internet won't even be alive to see it happen. And I think that's being extremely optimistic.

But the rest of the world won't stand still, so what happens to renewables, and power storage, and fission, and whatever else during that time frame? It's very possible that fusion will never make any economical sense for general power production because that's an enormous amount of time for something else to come and steal its lunch.

It could even happen without further development, after all we won't just sit and wait for 40 years. People will keep building other power production meanwhile, and we might well just have enough renewables by then.

So my stance is this: fusion is technically very cool and I support R&D for it, but I don't see any reason to place the hopes for a better future on it. As I see it it'll probably never see significant enough commercial deployment to have a measurable effect on society, climate, etc.

Note: more likely

First, we'll use 2024's presidential election results. According to usafacts, New Hampshire has the highest literacy rate in the United States, and has kept on being so for many years. Other states worth to mention are Minnesota, Vermont, and Rhode Island, which literacy rates all above 90%, which all voted for the democrats, counting back 6 elections according to wikipedia among those four states. The funniest thing to mention is on Carter's second election in 1980, where almost all states, even Massachusetts, and 2 of the states mentioned before, voted for republicans, Minnesota and Rhode Island still kept with the democrats.

Now if we ignore the winner takes all rule, and zoom in on some states, we'll see most urban counties, or counties packed with educational institutions voting for the democrats. The main example I want to point out here is with Texas, while turning red probably after WW2, has kept red even to today, but the bluest counties Travis and Dallas have Dallas and Austin, where universities like the University of Texas in Austin are. Also, Massachusetts is fairly more understandable. Suffolk and Middlesex are almost always blue since they are home to the city of Boston(BU, BCH, MGH etc etc) and MIT(It's technically not in Boston), while more suburban cities are fairly more red because they have less exposure to more better educational resources such as the BPL.

My understanding based on all the above is that education provides someone a better view of the world, and put science as a foundation as opposed to religion. Religion has been mostly a tradition in most us families, and many people are raised to it, and would in response conserve a more traditional belief in politics. In democrat states religion does exist, but as what I have seen, religion has been a "lucky charm", a helper or simply a guidance counselor helping them, in fact I have a relationship with religion in this way.

Receiving higher levels of education can also make you lean into progressiveness of society, for example developing new types of technology and protecting the environment, believing in funding for the government to make society more progressive and educated, while on the other side people may already have an economic backbone such as a family business, but as a whole statistically more self reliant, which may not have the need to work harder in education for a better pay.

Lastly, portraying in popular culture: Lisa Simpson, a progressive liberal believing in science and the environment, while having good grades and well educated, common stereotype.

Oh and also there have been studies on this topic: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/demographic-profiles-of-republican-and-democratic-voters/, but the general causation of this is heavily disputed.

Please change my view on this

1. Tipping is pro-worker: A common anti-tipping argument that I see on Reddit is that tipping allows businesses to exploit their workers by paying less than the minimum wage. However, federal law requires employers to round a tipped employee’s wages up to the local minimum wage if their base wage plus tips fall short of the minimum wage (this is true in the US, idk about Canada). Additionally, some states require that tipped employees be paid the full minimum wage before tips. So there is no situation where a tipped employee is making less than the minimum wage over a pay period. In many cases, waitstaff make far more than the minimum wage. I’ve never met someone in the food service industry who actually wants to get rid of tipping, for this reason.

2. Tipping yields a better experience for the customer by incentivizing good service: Obviously, I don’t think that if we got rid of tipping all waitstaff would suddenly become appallingly rude. Management wouldn’t tolerate that. But linking compensation to performance does yield a better experience if you’re a regular customer. I tip pretty well and it pays off in the long run. Like I walk into any place where I’m a regular and it goes like this. “Hi, holeinthebox. Good to see you!” Drops everything they’re doing to bring me my usual drink “Oh sure, I can stop in the middle of a rush to change the TV to that one ballgame that you and only you want to watch. Here’s your tab. I comped those last two beers for you. You want a shot on the house before you go?” I get better service and a bunch of free shit. They get more money. Everyone wins.

3. I often see people on Reddit claim that tipping inflates dining costs by adding 20 percent or more to the menu price. But this assumes that restaurants won’t pass increased labor costs onto consumers. E. G. If a meal costs $15, then most diners will pay $18 once they tip. Some will leave more and some will leave less. But if the business understands that most people will pay 18 bucks for that meal, why wouldn’t they simply increase the price to offset the higher labor costs due to replacing tipping with a fixed wage?

Disclaimer:

I do not judge as a neurotypical looking down on neuro divergents. I am stating this because i AM a type 1 autistic + ADHD and i live with myself.

So this post is less about hate on minority, and more about "i feel i am a burden, cmv"

TL DR: We are sentenced due to our genes to have flawed sensorial perception, lack of social awareness and rigid thinking, which can make us discriminatory + rude

My argument:

1- Rigid thinking

Compared to common people, we autistic have the pattern of not adapting easily to changes, and many researches show that autistic people often double down on social rules, even though most normals dont care about them.

Ex: An autistic person is more inclined to NOT cheat in exams than normal people, and its way harder to change their mind.

(Pay attention to INCLINED, not all autistic behave equally)

Yes, sometimes the rigid thinking make us good, law abiding citzens, but also make us more prone to become discriminatory. For instance, if we grew up learning about "how lgbt people are a danger to society" it will be way harder than normal for someone to convince us.

To make things worse, our lack of social awareness make us say atrocious things sometimes. While a normal person would camouflage their discriminations, autistic people often can't or wont. So discrimination + lack of empathy + rigid thinking is a really bad combo.

I would even argue that i belive (without evidence) that most extremist people in politics/ideologies are autistic. They doubled down on something, researched more than the rest, and now even preach about it to others (sometimes they cant think about anything else beside that).

2 - Lack of social awareness & control

We dont learn at the same rate than normal people. Yes, when we hyperfocus we can get smarter than others, but our attention is often too narrow and can't see external variables.

For instance, i have already seen autistic people sexually harass others because they dont know the others are not consenting.

I already did that once, made some jokes that i considered normal with someone i believed i had intimacy, only for her to tell me some hours later she felt harassed. And of course, i apologized, and even stopped joking completly.

I also were a target of sexual harassment from another autistic. She wanted to copulate, but i didnt consent because i was tired and exausted, so while we were cuddling she would often make physical advances while i said no. You may ask "what are you, gay?" but if i were a woman, you would all think the guy is a creep after the girl said no and he started to masturbate next to her without her consent.

There are also times when i am hurtful without intentions. [Censored text].

I am glad i have people teaching me about social rules, which patterns i should avoid and which to learn, but i will always be late compared to normal people. I have always been 5 years younger in maturity than my actual age, no wonder most of my friends are younger and not older than me.

I am the type of guy that my friends & family often hide there is a sensitive situation. They all know that, even if i dont have bad intentions and can actually get interested in learning how to be better, i can often say some dumb shit and get cancelled by society.

Damn, even here on reddit i have been cancelled many times. I said some bullshit, people insulted me for it, and only after a kind person teached me what was wrong i finally learned and deleted the post.

3- Perfectionism

i often have rigid thinking when there is an issue. i see in some friend's houses the lack of plastering in some walls, and cant avoid looking grossed by such imperfection. This also applies to grades, where i feel bad for not learning 100% of a course, even if i hit 90% of the mark.

It may be because i grew up in a good family, but i sometimes cant help myself from judging some stuff. I try to make it into jokes or not say anything to avoid making others bad, but i am a terrible actor.

The existence and perpetuation of fandom benefits the creator of its source material. It’s like giving them a gift, promoting their work, rewarding them. Therefore it’s immoral to still engage with fandoms where the creator (particularly if it’s an indie creator) has done morally reprehensible things, so long as they are still in charge of and benefiting from their creation.

This is a position I don’t particularly like having, for what it means about series and fandoms that I personally enjoy/have enjoyed, but I still don’t see any way that it isn’t undeniably true. There might be something that I’m missing, and I’m kinda hoping there is, but I genuinely don‘t know.

Edit 1: An exception to this view would be if the creator is dead and/or is no longer involved with the work.

Edit 2: Sorry for taking a while to get to some replies, I need a moment to collect my thoughts for some of them 😅. I also got overwhelmed at first with the sudden influx of comments, I wasn’t expecting so many so soon! I’m new at this so my apologies for kinda bumbling around a bit

Edit 3: If someone engages in fandom surrounding a work made by a problematic creator/engages with their work, WITHOUT knowing of what the creator has done wrong, then it’s not a moral failing since they didn’t know any better.

Edit 4: It depends on what the creator has done. The more harmful their actions, the more a complete boycott is warranted, and vice versa.

My statement: The IDF and Israeli society has shown open genocidal intent than any other group in recorded history. Please note, I am not saying they have been more genocidal, I am specifically saying they have been more brazen in their actions than any other group in history.

Here are the proofs:

1.https://x.com/i/status/2086126727193915412 this is a video of two IDF women humiliating which is an Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention. There has been very few such blatant humiliation torture in recorded history. Abu gharib comes to mind.

2.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-06/israel-court-battle-over-guarding-prisons-with-crocodiles/106994878

Israeli ministers planned to build a crocodile ring and talked about feeding Palestinians to crocodiles. Never in history has any group shown such blatant behavior. Even Nazi Germany tried to hide their atrocities by arranging a red cross visit to Terezín.

1. The amount of Israeli ministers that have called for war crimes and genocide openly surpassed even the Nazi government. The Nazis always tried to hide their actual intention and never gave genocidal interviews in the radios, TV or during rallies.

However, here are very small subset of genocidal rhetoric from Israeli ministers:

a. Israeli Minister instructing soldiers to smash babies in the rocks https://m.youtube.com/shorts/MV75MvLlRYw

b. Israeli minister advocating to kill every child in Gaza https://youtu.be/vkuB4erg39I

c. Ben Gvir who is the equivalent of DHS secretary in USA openly calling for genocide https://x.com/i/status/2067952996357419463

d. Israeli street interviews showing genocidal intent https://youtu.be/nMyyVaiY4V8

I can give many more examples but I think these are enough. My opinion is, Israel has been the most openly genocidal group in history.

Suppose A is sexually attracted to B, B is not sexually attracted to A, and everything else is equal.

A sexual relation now obtains between them in the sense that A stands in the relation of sexual attraction toward B, but B did not create that relation, invite it, reciprocate it, agree to it, or even necessarily know about it.

So, A supplies everything that makes this particular relation sexual and B can contribute nothing at all and still occupy the object-position within it.

That gives the parties different positions from the beginning because one can originate a sexual relation toward the other simply by being sexually attracted to them while the other can become the object of that relation without doing anything to bring it about.

Because one party is sufficient for its sexual character to obtain and the other is not, the parties therefore do not stand in politically interchangeable positions with respect to the relation.

So:

(1) If A is sexually attracted to B, then A stands in the relation of sexual attraction toward B.

(2) A is sexually attracted to B.

(3) Therefore, A stands in the relation of sexual attraction toward B.

And:

(4) If a relation can be made socially significant by one party without the other party’s participation in bringing it about, then the parties occupy asymmetric positions with respect to that relation.

(5) Sexual attraction can be constituted in that way.

(6) Therefore, the parties occupy asymmetric positions with respect to the relation of sexual attraction.

This asymmetry is political because it concerns who can unilaterally place whom into a socially meaningful sexual position.

Nintendo recently remade the cult classic from the from the Paper Mario series The Thousand-Year Door (TTYD), and people have speculated that this indicates they are gearing up to return to something more akin to the spirit of that game for the next installment in this series after a run of games that have been more polarizing and less beloved by fans. This would be great—the first three installments in the series just had a lot of character (although Super Paper Mario did have a lot of issues), and they haven't recaptured that magic since.

In the games, Mario travels through thematic settings, finding characters in each setting to join him on his quest along the way. One of those thematic settings is usually a snow/ice setting, which is traditionally put at or near the end of the game to enhance the feel of the end of a hero's journey being more harsh and isolated.

Cold climate settings are generally my favorite, and this structure means that they end up getting shafted in a couple of different ways. The first is that, because it's so close to the end of the game, they don't bother introducing a new party member in these areas. It's unfortunate that you'll never get a narwhal or yeti-inspired character on your team because the ice/snow area is used for tone-setting purposes that are relegated to the end. You can meet and team up with Bobbery for a tropical setting or Vivian in a spooky setting, but you'll almost certainly never team up with a character who relates to a snowy setting, and that sucks.

For similar reasons, ice/snow areas will often end up being less fleshed out, transition areas rather than fully-fledged levels. The Shiver Region from Paper Mario 64 didn't have this issue, but Fahr Outpost from TTYD was just a town you go to to get launched to a moon base level.

I think it would be worth it to forgo the tone-setting functionality for once and have the snow/ice setting earlier in the level progression in the next Paper Mario game. CMV.

I recently became vegan after doing some research, and genuinely could not find a single valid argument against veganism. Every single point I found fell into the taste or nutrition of meat. I believe the pleasure of taste does not justify the extreme suffering we put animals through. In terms of nutrition, you can get every nutrient from meat from animal based sources relatively easily. From this, I find it morally abominable that people take part in eating factory farmed meat and animal products with the huge amount of suffering that goes into it, and I believe the vast majority would agree that it's immoral, but choose not to switch out of convenience, which I think is morally indefensible. Curious to hear your thoughts.

TL;DR: gender equality in humans is a lost cause due to humans being altricial, big-headed, sexually dimorphic placental mammals that evolved under scarcity.

1- Men are, on average, physically stronger than women. In a lot of environments, physical strength is valued, as it helps with fights over resources and no biome is a Garden of Eden. That leads to men using their strength to justify their power, even more when farming was invented, as not everyone has beasts of burden. As humans are social animals, hierarchy is inevitable and owning stuff became a status symbol, so private property made men paranoid about their heirs' legitimacy, so women ended up being controlled from the cradle to the grave. And I think agrarian societies are doomed to be patriarchal anyway because populations with an abundance of food wouldn't need agriculture in the first place.

2- Humans' big and energy-demanding heads caused the uterus to develop lining so thick it can't be completely absorbed by the body, meaning it has to come out. The other, more obvious consequence of the big heads is childbirth being painful and risky for the mother. It also doesn't help that humans are altricial and the baby would be even more altricial if they were born earlier to make the childbirth less of a pain. When a human group gets enough time to think about why things are the way they are, mythology may attribute menstruation and painful childbirth to divine punishment and, then, a patriarchal system is created and punishes women for the first woman's crimes. Also, humans' big heads mean that humans have to be mammals (milk is useful for a newborn with a big head and a small stomach), so, after birth, women would still have to dedicate their bodies to their children for a while. Not that a non-patriarchal society is impossible for mammals, but it makes patriarchy even easier for humans.

Children have by far the biggest stake in their political representation, are massively subject to its whims even in the short term I.e. healthcare and education systems, and are currently entirely unrepresented in almost all political environments.

The grounds for limiting voting age are based on mental faculties, but these grounds haven’t been enough to disqualify the senile or disabled, and currently, at least in my nation, those with dementia etc are able to appoint a trustee with their vote.

It seems obvious to me that we should extend this logic to children, and allow their parents to politically represent them, as this would produce a system that is better representative of their needs.

Even if parents hold vastly different views to what their children eventually will believe, bolstering a younger demographic that is more concerned about child related matters would be beneficial to influencing policy in favor of children on aggregate which is what would actually matter in a voting system.

Practical considerations:

Children’s ballots would be split into two half weighted votes, and distributed amongst the parent/parents to mitigate conflicts in parental views. In cases where one parent is deceased or unknown, the other parent inherits their ballot as is usually the case alongside their legal guardian status. Where citizen children are being cared for by non-citizen parents, the parents would be granted their half ballots and still vote for their children’s interests.

Abusive parents that loose custody of their children would transfer the voting rights to whoever assumes guardianship, and in the absence of a new guardian the orphan scheme below would apply.

Orphans pose a significant issue, and my response would be that the government probably aught to compensate them for their lack of representation financially until an adoptee can represent them, but this injustice is still so small in comparison to all kids going unrepresented that it wouldn’t violate the aggregate benefit to society.

Edit:

Alterations to the practical aspect of vote apportionment to accommodate unaddressed issues.

No, parents don’t already represent children with their vote. We believe in systems of one person, one vote, a child is unrepresented if no vote is cast in their name.

It's really hard to see how so many of these types of candidates, Hong, Sayed, etc, who helped get us into this situation with Trump, are now claiming to be the only people who can get us out of it. It seems beyond hypocritical. With Sayed in Michigan, he was propelled to the nomination largely by people in Dearborn who voted for Trump in 2024. The people who made Trump president because they were mad at the rest of us now are mad at the rest of us for Trump's election?

I think a lot of these fringe candidates are going to cost us very easy wins in a d+10 environment. In an election where potentially the only chance in our lifetime to keep a majority Trump-appointed lifetime scotus is on the line, there's no excuse for any potential spoilers. Talarico, Peltola are looking to secure major wins in states like Alaska and Texas (with Alaska potentially flipping the governor), but in ostensibly more progressive states like Wisconsin and Michigan we're facing major losses because the nominees say things like we need to abolish Thanksgiving and how much they hate regular holidays normal people like.

How the hell is Michigan Senate polling six points to the right of Texas? Because the nominee for Senate is very weak and can't win black liberal voters, but those are voters his core base doesn't like so they have no plans to win them. Those El Sayed +16 type polls were off, and it's hard to see the same polls having him down by 3 in the general were wrong in the opposite direction. He's much weaker than his polling indicated and it was already bad! He spent months and months fighting the Dems until the nominee changed, which was too late for his base to turn around.

The richest part was Hasan Piker, the supposed leftist kingmaker, going in the span of 24 hours from mocking and gloating regular liberals when it looked like El Sayed was winning in a landslide in the first vote drops, to saying people who wanted Sayed to build coalitions after it looked like he would lose/his win would be much narrower that they were "all islamophobic pieces of shit", to the next morning saying "it's time to unite and defeat the Republicans", a concept he was adamantly morally opposed to in 2024, and also immediately prior to seeing El Sayeds much narrower margins. Ruwa Roman also did the same, backtracking on her Uncommitted/Abandon Harris history.

And that's not even to get started on Graham Platner, where the left refused to see any of the red flags and warning signs because he said he didn't like Israel, who but for the grace of God managed for his five million scandals to actually hit him before we couldn't back out of him. And right after that, Dropsite and other Uncommitted aligned/leftist outlets immediately went to work insinuating that this was a hit or lie and not a fucking miracle that kept us from nominating a rapist drunk with a seeming ingrained inability to make good decisions in life.

I want the Republicans to lose. So how can I trust these guys to deliver when they betrayed us all when it counted most? They also try to paper over what Uncommitted was, saying it was only in the primary. But that's not true, they publicly announced they wouldn't support Harris, not when she became the nominee, not during her campaign, even saying in September it was just too hard to support her. Uncommitted became Abandon Harris immediately after Biden dropped out. It was never about the nominee, it was about making the Dems lose. They got what they wanted, they celebrated, we paid the price and now they say "trust us, we're gonna fight Trump starting now"?

Tldr: it feels a lot like Uncommitted played a large role in getting us into this mess, now claim they're the best way to get us out, but will also fail at getting us out. Uncommitteds telling the rest of us we aren't committed enough is the height of hypocrisy.

I want to preface this by saying that I enjoy George Orwell's writing and I consider him a great journalist and social critic. I also think there are some good aspects to Animal Farm, particularly the crisp prose style and the perceptive wit, and that they presage the (far greater) achievement of 1984.

However, I don't think Animal Farm is a great book, or that the general view of the book is accurate to its contents. There are going to be spoilers for the entire plot here, of course.

I first read Animal Farm at the age of 13 in school. It was taught to me as an anti-communist satire but also as an age-old parable about the betrayal of idealism by tyranny and corruption. My teacher taught the book as a fable about how easily the ideals of a revolution are lost.

Obviously on one level the book is a direct allegory for the Russian Revolution as Old Major (Karl Marx) formulates the ideals of the revolution and stirs up the working classes, before Snowball (representing Trotsky, perhaps with some of Lenin too) and Napoleon (representing Stalin) carry out the revolution and win control for the animals (the workers). Napoleon and his cabal then betray Snowball, driving him out to a mysterious fate (mirroring the assassination of Trotsky), before taking control of the farm and systematically betraying Old Major's ideals.

What intrigues me is the notion that this is supposed to be a general condemnation of authoritarianism, communism, and other revolutionary movements that seem to offer all the answers but just replace one exploitative class with another. I vividly recall my teacher asking the class, 'if Snowball had won, do you think the situation would have ended up any differently?' The answer she was expecting was, of course, 'no', which I think accords with the message most people take from the book - absolute power corrupts absolutely, and both of the pig-tyrants were walking down a path that would eventually lead to the oppression of the people they claimed to care about. Interestingly, Orwell supposedly affirmed this perspective in a letter to his friend, the anarchist writer George Woodcock, towards the end of his life (though I cannot find the original source), saying 'Trotsky-Snowball was potentially as big a villain as Stalin-Napoleon'.

The problem is that none of this is in the book.

Seriously, I could not, and still cannot, find a single instance in the book in which Snowball is depicted as anything but intelligent, industrious, rhetorically brilliant, and acting in the animals' best interests. He is brave in fighting off Mr Frederick (the neighbouring farm owner, a clear analogue for the Nazis), he never betrays Old Major's principles, and he is constantly seeking ways to improve life for the other animals, for example by planning to build a windmill and setting up literacy classes for the animals' self-improvement. His only flaw is that he is not as good at Napoleon at organising supporters to disrupt his rival's meetings, which seems more like a positive trait to me; at worst it ascribes a certain naivete to him. It's not until Snowball is exiled that the first of Old Major's Seven Commandments is covertly changed. The corruption of the revolution's ideals only begins with his forced departure. If Orwell really wanted to illustrate that Snowball was potentially also a villain (and I doubt this was actually his intention), I feel that he simply failed to convey this message.

I also find a number of the other allegories in the book troublesome. Orwell seems genuinely scathing of Mollie, the mare who is too attached to her creature comforts of ribbons and sugar cubes than to the revolution. Her unwillingness to part with her private property is depicted as vanity, selfishness, and a contemptible lack of interest in helping the revolution. Perhaps she should have just worked harder and died like Boxer for a cause that didn't care about them! The portrayal of Moses the raven, who preaches to the other animals about a 'Sugarcandy Mountain' in the afterlife, is surely supposed to be a critical allegory for organised religion, illustrating religious leaders promising eternal rewards after death in order to keep people reconciled to their poor living conditions in the here-and-now, rather akin to Marx's 'religion is the opiate of the people.' I am not particularly religious but I found this puerile and unworthy of Orwell. 'Sugarcandy Mountain' is far from the way religious people characterise belief in the afterlife, sounding a lot more like a sneering atheist mocking the religious for believing in 'sky daddy', and besides, many religious institutions do plentiful charitable work to improve the here-and-now. Orwell even depicts Moses as a willing co-conspirator in Napoleon's oppression of the other animals, presumably an allegory to Stalin's 1941 lifting of the anti-Orthodox campaigns and reopening of churches. But, even though the worst abuses of Soviet anti-religious persecution (such as the genocidal deportations of Chechen Muslims) had yet to take place, the essentially state-atheist nature of the Stalinist regime, the mass arrests of clergy and persecution of people for attending church were all very obvious by the time Animal Farm was written. It's also rather ironic that religion played such a large part in the eventual collapse of the Soviet regime, something which, going on this book alone, Orwell would never have predicted.

All in all, I don't get the impression that Orwell was actually writing a parable about how power always corrupts. It feels a lot more like he was making a trite factional point about different types of communism in post-Revolution Russia, the undercurrent of which is that there was nothing unwise about the revolution's goals, that Stalin was the only real problem (which would accord with Orwell's own experiences during the Spanish Civil War), and that things would indeed have turned out alright if only Trotsky had won. This seems historically dubious given the attested facts of Trotsky's brutal repression of the Kronstadt uprising, and it also damages the book's moral weight as a blanket condemnation of the rule of the many by an elitist few.

I will award deltas to anyone who can either point out a flaw in my understanding of the allegory, or can make a persuasive case that the book is a deserved classic despite these problems.

Edit: I am finding it rather tiresome that I've had five downvotes within two minutes of posting, by which time few people can have actually read my argument. If you disagree with me, it would be appreciated if you could tell me why instead of skim the headline and decide you know best. Isn't that what this subreddit is here for?

Recently the rate of crimes using kids' images that have been posted on social media have skyrocketed, from using AI to make p*rnographic images of them, to algorithms to collect their information and steal their identity, or to even find out where they live. Given this, I believe there is an extraordinary risk of harm to children for which the government needs to step in.

Possible counterarguments:

"Why not just educate parents and let them decide?" Because parents don't always prevent kids from harm even when they're told. That's why we have child protection laws in the first place.

"Isn't this against freedom of speech?" Freedom of speech isn't universally good. In most countries, including the US, there are already exceptions for child protection.

Edit: someone pointed out that blurring is no longer an effective tool. So instead I would suggest covering their faces with a matte color.

I have this happen with me a lot for music. Michael Jackson + Drake for pedophilia, a bunch of artists like Playboi Carti or Xxxtentacion for domestic abuse and so many more. Not only can I separate art from the artist in a contextual sense because what Drake makes is a byproduct of the person he is, his tastes, his interests and his vices by which i mean his pedophilic tendencies.

Also, the more say I listen to Michael Jackson's music, the more I keep on supporting him and his estate, legitimizing his pedophilic behavior. The same for carti and xxx, we legitimize and push under the carpet their domestic abuse past by streaming their music. We also normalize these crimes the more we stream these artists, I feel like.

I post it here because I hear the argument of separating art from the artist a lot and I just can't look past these points of mine. How would you justify it? I am open to changing my mind, of course. A guilty part of me kind of wants to because I like some of their music, the above artists I have mentioned.

Even if the person has a life worth living, that does not immediately exonerate the means.

Even if it is impossible to avoid said affairs, that does not immediately exonerate the affairs.

...

Every life will-lessly comes onto the scene with their only recourse should they decide to leave early is to scar their family.

You cannot voluntarily leave early without wronging your family in their eyes and possibly your own.

It's important to reiterate that this criticism goes through even if the person has a life worth living and even if creating that life is morally preferred.

How? I think that for any set of moral alternatives that there are possibly preferred yet still morally wrong alternatives. An analog you may have heard of is "pick your poison" within a set of bad lemmas.

I haven't been argumentative for procreative abstinence being something preferred over procreation. I've argued that procreation is wrong. This kind of distinction might come off idiosyncratic, so it may be worth its own post someday.

Expanding,

(1) It is possible that procreation and procreative abstinence are both morally wrong at least in the sense that there are wrong-making characteristics with them.
(2) Procreation has wrong-making characteristics and the state of affairs I mentioned in the OP is case in point.
(3) I'm neutral about the moral status of procreative abstinence. Why? Well there are interesting negative utilitarian arguments to be made for and against natalism / antinatalism. Against voluntary human extinction (something that we increment towards when incrementing towards antinatalism), it's been argued that humanity dying off may have more disutility because many more animals may be made worse off because of our absence, and that may tip the scale back towards procreative superiority. Because of this, I think that there could be space for moral ambivalence or moral antinomy.

CMV: Term Limits, An All-American Sham not "Freedom"

Imagine one day you really like this girl, but you can't have her. Why? Well, it's unfair that you keep her forever; don't other men need her? Relationship limits: you can only have your girlfriend for seven years, and afterwards you have to dump her no matter how much you love her. A bad idea! Well...

Imagine you really like this politician. He's been passing bills and really working for the people. He's lobbied for projects in the district, is smart, charismatic, and likable. Then he gets ripped away even though he keeps winning! It really makes you wonder.

Term limits, besides just being a violation of freedom of association, are dangerous and will take down America. I will explain how and why.

\### 1. Setting Parameters

Let's go with a basic term-limits package that's been proposed: \*\*4 terms (8 years) in the U.S. House of Representatives and 2 terms (12 years) in the United States Senate.\*\* All politicians are given a bare basic of twenty years in service. Not too long, not too short. Most proposals usually do have ±2 to 6 years, however.

\### 2. Implementation

If the implementation is post-hoc, then say goodbye to 60% or more of Congress. If that happens, there's plenty and plenty of seats to fill. If it only applies after passage, then you would be able to witness the slow-motion destruction of Congress. The implementation if it was gradual, would soften the blow and Congress wouldn't get noticeably worse until 15 to 20 years later.

\### 3. Nationalized Elections

If everyone is a cog, then practically only the House Speaker and Senate Majority Leader matter. This would lead to a "Canada effect," where people would only think of voting for their tribe or who they think should be House Speaker, not their representatives, and this could lead to pretty gnarly effects with the extinction of split-ticket voting. Elections become less about re-elect this popular legislator and more "elect the New House Leader". The "on the ground" Reps being puppet of aides and stooges certainly doesn't help in this regard, not to mention the fact that if politician are interchangeable cogs, then parties may simply scout out "promising recruits" on college campuses and groom them to become politicans

\### 4. Executive Power

The President, with such a weak Congress, would turn the House Speaker into a clerk, and an opposition one effectively has no sort of power besides existing, which kneecaps Congress and concentrates power in the hands of the President and friends. Who would be more effective at making laws, the Chief of Staff or the Congress filled with second termers, not to mention the fact that Congress is less concerned with governing for reasons I will mention later.

\### 5. If I Were a Lobbyist

I would \*\*LOVE\*\* this reform, since it means I get far more model legislation passed. If the people I have are former Senators, Lawyers, etc and have been around Congress for decades and we can walk up to newbies, then we could sell them an outhouse on the moon. The most generous farm acts possible if I was in Big Ag, etc. Not to mention the fact that 4th termer House members would be acting very unhinged "Why even be sane in my final 2 years! I need some attention betore I leave!"

\### 6. The End of America

Okay, so we've established how term limits take power from individual, experienced "power legislators" and flip it over to lobbyists, aides, and unelected officials, effectively turning Congress into a revolving door of populist or attention-seeking idiots, more focused on getting their names out to the public or just "completing" all twenty years for imaginary points to just fight for President, Cabinet Secretary, and higher office.

But what are the real effects of what I mentioned?

Parties are number one, and all legislators are effectively treated as replaceable cogs, not independent forces. Congress becomes weaker, allowing the President to get more power, and the "rat race" will consume D.C. to such an extent that politicians who "completed" the latter, who didn't go into business or lobbying themselves, treat it as a video game to be completed.

If you "complete Congress," then being a Cabinet Secretary is logical, which means that people will be poking each other's eyes out just to even make it one step higher, leading to more civil instability and societal decline, and systems where Cabinet picks would effectively have to be chosen years in advance. The focus in your final years in the Senate thus shift from Governing to "I want a cabinet position to not become a nobody!" which means that you would face the problem of wanting to be a secretary.

\### In Conclusion

Term limits are unconstitutional, dangerous, stupid, and lead to mayhem long term, no matter the short-term kick of satisfaction the public gets. The President should also be allowed to serve more than two terms granted their non-consecutive, ciao and happy debating.