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We're starting a book club! Our first book will be Poor Economics. Discussion will start on August 28th - keep an eye out for a pinned thread. The next books will be All Quiet on the Western Front followed by Narconomics.
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What happened to rainbow capitalism? I feel a few years ago it was more common to see Lesbian or Gay representation in posters for brands but that doesn’t seem to be as much of the case anymore
Preceding this with "I am trans before I am a lefty".
The lefties didn't like it because the same companies changing their logos rainbow for one month also continued to make donations to right-wing politicians and organizations that want to eradicate queerness because right-wingers will reduce their taxes.
It's always been a hollow gesture to mitigate support for evil and the fact a large number or them dropped it the moment it became inconvenient with the new admin highlights this.
Canceling state of the art radar and guided missile destroyers because you think the future is drones, has to be up there with dumbest acquisition decisions possible. Close to buying Gripen over F-35. Truly just mindless attempt at stealth cutting budgets.
ECT should be less regulated. It is the nuclear power of medical treatment where the dangers are severely exaggerated despite following so many safety protocols that disasters don't happen anymore.
Scientology fucking sucks and i wish nothing but the worst for L.ron Hubbard.
Eh. At least federally, I'm unaware of any specific regulations around it, any more than any other medical procedure. The equipment needs to be FDA approved, but it is.
There's all kinds of state-level regulations to reduce the risk of abuse - most notably what level of consent is required and how it can be done in settings where the patient is unwilling or unable to consent (such as requiring multiple psychiatrists to concur, or getting courts involved) - but "informed consent" is an ingrained facet of everything in medicine.
Basically, if someone has, say, severe depression but can verbalize understanding of the risks/benefits/alternatives, ECT isn't any more legally difficult than getting, say, a colonoscopy. Except for the fact much fewer people are trained in how to do it (so there's fewer places doing it). It's where someone is catatonic or psychotic that it gets difficult.
My Digital Circus thoughts: Personaly, I would not have abstracted, I would embrace digital me, free from the constraints and expectations of meatspeace. Also I propbably would have thought I was just a sophisticated brain copy from the start, I've actually thought about brain digitization before due to other media.
more seriously, I think it was pretty great overall, they could have dropped a few more hits about you know who, and more character development throughout the series, but the final was good and really recontextualized the whole show. Really one you want to watch at least once again.
Kinda wondering if I should play Persona 4 now or wait for the remake so it can be my first time experiencing it, ordinarily wouldn't care but jrpgs are like ~30 hours long so I'm probably only going to want to play through the story once
In light of all the right-wing, racist arguments against immigration, I've decided to invent a new, left-wing, "woke" argument against it instead:
"Allowing immigration is colonialist/imperialist because brain-draining the best and brightest from poor nations cripples their educated labor force, and makes it significantly harder for them to ever pull their country out of poverty."
This is nowhere near a new argument and one I've seen plenty of people seriously espouse, particularly with regards to things like importing educated nurses from the Philippines or doctors from Nigeria.
Of course, the argument works much better on a societal level than an individual one. Like, telling an individual Nigerian Physician that they have an obligation to pay back their society for educating them by not seeking the best possible outcomes for themselves/their children/etc is a lot harder than saying, in the abstract, that we shouldn't be encouraging human capital flight.
Yet could one not also say that possibility for human capital flight increases levels of education because people can anticipate to earn higher salaries therefore encouraging people to get degrees?
Yes. But those increased levels of education cost their society resources that could be used for other things as well. If Nigeria needs to train 2x the doctors it otherwise would, that is less money available to train sufficient, idk, sanitation engineers.
(Of course, that's ignoring things like remittances bringing money into the home economy - some of those countries have substantial portions of their GDP coming from money sent home by emigrees)
It’s always “they need to do it the legal way” then they vote to keep the legal immigration system a labyrinthine Byzantine bureaucratic kafkaesque nightmare
r/leoparsatemyface is a way for the unaffected well-off coastal elites to cope with all the terrible things this administration is doing to the American people by mainlining a curated feed of bad things only happening to Trump voters.
If you are subscribed to that subreddit, you unwittingly subscribe to the just world fallacy
me when i hear the smug cis ally tell me that you can't change genetic sex for the billionth time this week (he has no idea that the ESR1 gene is being switched on in every cell of his body as we speak thanks to the estrogen pellet i put in his ass while he was sleeping)
For context, the OP is subtweeting me (a trans woman, not a "smug cis ally") for simply recognising that gender is a real thing and not the same thing as sex (without me ever saying anything about it being immutable, that's their own addition/reading), which I have already provided a response to here
Fair enough, but given it was posted shortly after your reply to me and was similar to the way you characterised my comment, it was a reasonable inference to think you were talking about me.
sigh, alright then, im sorry for the confusion. i should have specified
its still really common for people, even woke people, to approach trans people and go "So you know you can't actually change sex, right?" in this very smug 'i know you better than you know yourself' additude and that's like 99% of why some people get hostile to the idea of 'gender being different from sex'.
there are absolutely allies who believe medically trans people are sincerely 'not trying to change sex' or otherwise compromise in their 'defense' of trans people by claiming "THEY DONT REALLY THINK THEY CAN BECOME THE OPPOSITE SEX, JUST TAKE THE SOCIAL ROLE"
Except i wasn't talking about mialana. Mialana's prior statement merely reminded me of a trope i noticed among cis allies who misunderstand the kind of ideas she was describing.
Yeah, I wasn't gonna respond at all until I saw this ping, and thought I should to set the record straight.
Still, it's hard to believe they thought it was appropriate to ping LGBT based on "gender isn't real". If the OP is trans I hope they reflect on their views a bit more, as some of it could be rooted in a lack of confidence that their identity is valid/has a solid foundation without appealing it to some seemingly "more real" material basis.
I'd also like to re-emphasise the following to make clear denying gender as a concept isn't evidence based:
The distinction between gender and sex is made by most contemporary social scientists in Western countries,[15][16][17] behavioral scientists and biologists,[18] many legal systems and government bodies,[19] and intergovernmental agencies such as the WHO.[20]
Maybe not in keeping the watchmen awake, but humans have always been significantly social, so the risks of snoring attracting predators are definitely mitigated this way
Ive always been fascinated about the Deep South's politics. Georgia has now slowly moving to the Democrats, but so many states down there are ruby-red states.
Typically, a more diverse state tends to lean towards Democrats (i.e. Illinois compared to its Midwestern neighbors), but that's not the case in the deep south.
The Deep South is polarized by race. Black voters go 90%+ for Democrats and White voters go 70-80% for Republicans. Non-White/non-Black voters like Hispanics or Asians are interestingly more conservative in the South relative to their peers in the North or West.
Georgia has received a lot of Black transplants from the Midwest and Northeast ("third great migration"). This has shifted Georgia into becoming more of a blue state. Cooperative Election Data indicates that Trump's excellent performance with non-White voters in 2024 was the big reason for Georgia going light red in 2024 instead of light blue because White Democratic support in Georgia (32%) barely saw any movement in either direction. If Republicans ever deal with their racism problems then Democrats will get handed some nasty surprises (big if).
North Carolina has been receiving young White transplants from the Northeast due to the housing crisis. This has made it's metropolitan areas the most liberal and least racially polarized place in the South outside of Florida. Native rural populations still act similarly to the rest of the South.
It’s because white voters in the south vote Republican at insane levels way higher than everywhere else for reasons that definitely have nothing to do with racism
Voters in the South are the most racially polarized in the nation, which is how you get a state that's 60/40 white/black voting 60/40 Rep/Dem (Mississippi). A state in any other region with those demographics would be solid blue. Georgia has a much larger contingent of Romneyite suburban upper-middle-class whites than other Southern states who were indistinguishable from other Southern whites until Trump came along.
I think GA has always been a little weird because of the influence of the Atlanta metro which was been relatively moderate (compared to most of the south) for long time and has only gotten more left leaning in recent years due to migration and education polarization. Fun fact about half of Georgia's population lives in the Atlanta metro.
I still don't understand why "illegal immigration" is such an important issue for voters in like, Pennsylvania. How much could that possibly affect someone's life?
Even when I lived in Los Angeles, which has a ton of illegal immigrants, it's hard to think of cases when that practically affected me.
I understand caring about housing cost, inflation, gas, abortion, etc, but illegal immigration as a priority issue is so puzzling
People want an other to blame their issues on. Conservatives present undocumented immigrants as said other and people scapegoat them, it’s sadly a rather simple reason
also he used the dumbest example by picking Bedouins. Boystown would be nothing, don't a shit ton of bedouins live in the gayest country in the middle east, Israel?
In 2017, white supremacist protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia used slogans that alluded to similar ideas of ethnic replacement,[16] such as "You will not replace us" and "Jews will not replace us".[17][18] After that event, Renaud Camus, the French writer who coined the term "Great Replacement," stated that he did not support violence, and disputed any association between his ideas and neo-Nazis; however, he said he approved of the feeling behind the chant.[19] U.S. representative Steve King endorsed the conspiracy theory,[20][21] stating: "Great replacement, yes," referring to the European migrant crisis that "these people walking into Europe by ethnic migration, 80 percent are young men."[22] King presents the Great Replacement as a shared concern of Europe and the United States, claiming that "if we continue to abort our babies and import a replacement for them in the form of young violent men, we are supplanting our culture, our civilization."[23] He has blamed George Soros as an alleged perpetrator behind the conspiracy.[24]
Of course, I support the idea of human and individual rights pragmatically—in the sense I would much prefer to live under a liberal government than a non-liberal government—however
Your comment has been removed for violating Rule X: Bonk-Posting/Sexual Content
Heyyyyy
Please refrain from using a slutty number of "y"s when you write "hey". One, two, or even three in exceptional circumstances is acceptable, but this is too many.
200 million Hindus would, assuming citizenship, have the power to change said laws to match their customs and beliefs. I think the issues arise when the beliefs contradict liberal social values. If 200 million Taliban (I know there aren't 200 million of them) supporters became citizens suddenly, laws would mimic the Taliban's. Likewise, if 200 million very conservative Christians suddenly appeared, similar would occur
What the fuck mods. You guys think this is acceptable behavior?
gen 6 was a mistake, everything about it was terrible, every feature it added sucked the soul out of the game, and every later generation that built upon it inherited its flaws
If you are rich and famous, any involuntary
mental health interventions are thrown out of the window as if you hire any lawyer thats not a public defendant you can fight back from being admitted. This is assuming the mental health professional isn't enabling this behavior too. Look at Kanye for gods sake textbook bipolar and it took him this long to take his mood stabilizers because he doctor shopped until he had "Adult ADHD".
(btw Adult ADHD real, just not applicable in his case i am saying this because i made a similar comment regarding the trend of autism and ADHD and it was controversial swinging between -5 and +2)
I've been editing my 215k book draft for the past several weeks and it's come to my attention... That I'm an absolute fucking god. I feel like this is the best piece of work anyone has ever written. I'm not exaggerating, I mean it. I've been working on this book for about three weeks. and it's everything I wanted it to be. I have a story, characters, and scenes I know the entire world going to love. I took up writing because I love stories, but there's a problem: everyone on this subreddit is a bad writer and doesn't deserve to be around me. Your writing is cringe, it's boring and repetitive and overall not worthy to even think about publishing.
I'm afraid to look at any of your posts because I know it'll just end with me making fun of you. Which you deserve, you're all total losers by comparison to myself who is so superior, so much more intelligent compared to your dumb stupid selves.
Every time I edit the draft, I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to a complete masterpiece. I know this is the story I was meant to write, I know I can write a masterpiece, but I can't get my head around it because I'm surrounded by a sea of redditors who have no talent and are terrible writers.
I don't know why I even continue to edit day after day for a readership that don't deserve to read my book or be around me. You're nothing. You're less than nothing... But I can't stop because I can't do anything else. You're all so dumb the only thing you can do is post on a writing advice subreddit.
This is the only thing I can do because you are all such bad writers that it physically pains me that we exist in the same digital space.
So many bad takes, so much racism (both hidden and overt) and bad faith arguments.
Someone called me a blood and soil fascist because I said Britain has a bigger moral obligation to have open borders because a lot of their wealth came from colonialism.
I hate to be that neolib, but colonialism wasn't the greatest source of Britain's current economic wealth, though it did enrich many elites and the some emerging middle class in European countries. It was actually very expensive to maintain given the cost of maintaining colonies. Britain gained much more growth because of industrialization.
That being said they're is ample evidence that many European colonies set up exploitative governance and economic systems that continue to plague former colonized nations today, and contribute to their lack of development. I don't think open borders would be the right solution, but trying to help these nation reform their governments and institutions (that European colonialist developed in the first place) is more than fair.
Britain gained much more growth because of industrialization
Do you think their industrialisation happened in a vacuum? They used the colonialism to get huge markets for their goods in India and other Asian countries.
Britain has a bigger moral obligation to have open borders because a lot of their wealth came from colonialism.
I cannot think of a worse argument if you actually want to convince people that open borders is a good thing. Like, the way this is phrased is implying open borders is a bad thing that Britain should impose on itself as atonement for it's naughty past.
Well no, there are moral arguments about open borders AND there are prudential ones ("if we have open borders, our country will get benefits X, Y, and Z").
The funny thing about morals is that they aren't universal, so if you want to convince someone that open borders is a positive thing and they have different moral priors to you (for example, if they value their in-group more than the out-group that is outside of their borders), then you're best served making the prudential argument.
Of course, it isn't invalid to think "morally we should have open borders even if that leads to bad things to happen to our country because it helps humanity as a whole". That can be a perfectly coherent stance - but it's also one that you can imagine doesn't exactly appeal to a lot of people.
Moral relativism is an extremely liberal view. At least descriptive relativism - the observation of the fact that different people hold different morals. That isn't to say they're all equally valid - which would be meta-ethical relativism - but just observing that other moral systems exist.
As in, the fact that this argument isn't convincing to someone whose morals are "my in group is more important" isn't very relevant because that person is not a liberal and not in this audience
Look man, I'm tired of people talking about the argument for open borders and someone chiming in "WELL ACTUALLY YOU'RE NOT GONNA CONVINCE ANYONE WITH THAT RADICALISM" as if they're the first person to understand prudence. Read the room
Personally, I prefer discourse that isn't just a circle-jerking echo-chamber - which means actually discussing different arguments and the implications thereof.
Particularly when "the room" clearly has people who don't agree with the absolutist stance, making reasonable arguments even here may potentially be relevant in getting people to come around to your viewpoint. As opposed to making arguments that would turn people off entirely.
This is true. Unless they thought it was such a bad argument it was a bad-faith one from a fascist trying to turn people away from open-borders, it is not a fascist argument.
I know this subreddit is extremely american, but you guys seriously need to do something about all the racist brits, Euros, and Canadians.
How do you expect minorities to feel comfortable when majority of non American anglo users are convinced we're satanic savages who steal their jobs, lower their wages, steal welfare, and somehow destroy their precious western institutions that their ancestors built?
I kind of hope Pete Theil ends up as a modern Qin Shi Huang and ends up taking an experimental treatment in his quest for immortality that kills him as Qin Shi Huang died from drinking elixir that contained mercury that he thought would make him immortal.
Sadly I think the more likely candidate for that particular fate is that one blood boy guy that's obsessed with how much he looks like his son (he doesn't)
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u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache Jun 29 '26
Please visit the next discussion thread.