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@Mps1213
Also there’s no such thing as a drug that is “so addictive.” All drugs have the same addiction potential.
I'm on one prescription for a miscellaneous health condition. I take about one dose (pill) every 24 hours. If I miss a day, then I might not even realize it. I recently went 3 or 4 days straight without access to it and was perfectly fine. At the end of those 3 or 4 days I didn't feel any worse than I normally do. I probably don't need it to live a normal life, but I take it just in case.
What I can positively attest to is that if I'd spent 6 months as a heroin user, I wouldn't be able to casually manage 3 or 4 days without it. I'd feel very unpleasant, and my thoughts would be preoccupied with obtaining another fix.
So no, all drugs are not equally addictive, so far as addiction=dependency.
Addiction isn’t caused by drugs. Addiction is an environmentally induced disorder not a molecularly induced disorder.
You're suggesting it isn't an addiction if society is set up so that said drug habit doesn't carry consequences? If society at large refused to change along with this proposed legalization of all drugs, wouldn't said legalization do harm? Isn't your proposal only viable if combined with dozens of other changes that are unlikely to happen?
However you need to consider that less than 20,000 people die from heroin overdoses every year. Compared to 75k plus of multiple opioids at once.
This is fair, but the consequences for heroin or meth addiction go beyond overdosing. It's a truly miserable way to live that makes the attainment of happiness virtually impossible for most users.
There's a bizarre assumption that every American citizen would exactly know where to find a drug dealer if they wanted to use. That isn't true; making hardcore drugs available at gas stations would certainly make it available to a lot more people, and double or triple the number of people who use, since there are vast multitudes who would fall into that temptation if they easily could. Furthermore it would lower the psychological barrier to getting started, as the whole enterprise would feel "less risky" despite hardcore drug use being inherently risky.
The question you should be asking yourself is: is preventing several tens of thousands of overdose deaths worth converting hundreds of thousands if not several million people into drug addicts who aren't currently addicts?
Where the supply is regulated less than 1% of people die from those drugs, including fentanyl, dilaudid, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, etc.
Where the supply is regulated, the quantity you can get your hands on is limited. If anyone could get heroin but with this restriction in place, then a black market would continue to exist, making this a moot point.
I’m also not advocating for these drugs to be sold at a gas station (even though alcohol and tobacco and THC products are which you probably don’t complain about) I want them sold out of pharmacies as most of them already are.
Fair enough. But again, if only "those who need it" could buy heroin from the pharmacy, then street heroin would still exist for those who didn't get approved. If anyone could get it but their supply was rationed, then the same result, since few if any heroin users can bring themselves to stay at their original dosage/frequency of use without upping it.
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No it wouldn't. Legalization could potentially solve these problems:
1. People stealing or going broke/homeless because they can't afford super expensive street drugs.
2. People being reluctant to pursue treatment because they don't want to risk prosecution from admitting that they're using drugs.
3. Drugs being contaminated with adulterants (no guarantees, as even chocolate sold in mainstream retail stores contain heavy metals like lead.)
4. Needle sharing (also no guarantee if the needles are costly)
It would not stop people from:
1. Overdosing on heroin.
2. Not checking into rehab out of fear that a relapse after a month of detox could prove deadly, or because rehab is just unpleasant/expensive.
3. Overdosing on fentanyl because over time they've become so tolerant of heroin that it doesn't give them instant euphoria anymore and they want something stronger
4. Being fired because their drug habit makes them an unreliable employee
5. Going broke despite a job because they're just buying an excessive amount of a naturally expensive drug over an extended period.
6. Trying heroin at 14 because they got their 18 year old brother to go to the gas station and buy some for them.
7. Deadly car wrecks attributable to DUIs as these drugs are so addictive that users are seldom not high but still perceive the need to get in a car and drive somewhere.
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Turkey has ratified Sweden's NATO accession, leaving Hungary as the last holdout.
Should Sweden join the alliance, its control of the strategically important Gotland Island will give NATO control of the Baltic Sea, reversing the balance of power when it comes to a war in the Baltic States. Russia currently has "area denial" capabilities that would block NATO from reinforcing Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia by sea, giving them the upper hand. But should NATO gain the ability to bring in maritime reinforcements then even the least defensible region under their vast security umbrella would suddenly become a lot easier to defend.
The EU has a liberal agenda while the Orban administration has a conservative agenda. This, combined with charges of authoritarianism in Hungary, have led to a growing rift between the two sides, with the EU attempting punitive measures to influence Hungarian national policies. As a countermove, Hungary has sought to leverage its position as an EU and NATO member to veto certain actions by these organizations, such as a $50 billion dollar aid package to Ukraine by the former and Sweden's accession to the latter.
Orban has paid lip service to not being opposed to Sweden's accession, and has pledged to ratify at some point, but in practice the ongoing dispute could prove an obstacle. There's a good chance the situation won't be resolved until Hungary is either cowed into submission or appeased with concessions.
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Science is a closed system, like theology. It can only prove or disprove that which is within its purview. Which God isn't.
This is the solution to the "God of the gaps" problem. Wherever it seems that science contradicts religious claims, the situation is open to interpretation: the empiricist will say that religious claims have to narrow in scope over time to remain viable, while the believer will say we've merely established a limit to the applicability of science in that here it can only turn up the wrong answer.
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MLK's visible legacy was one of championing civil rights and fighting hate. It was one that the average white moderate could view as a good thing. He was able to be presented as a bipartisan public figure, though he privately held views on many topics which were distinctly partisan.
Malcolm X, on the other hand, was a black nationalist who promoted anti-white hate. Your average white moderate wasn't comfortable extolling this man as a hero since his views probably weren't less objectively disgusting than those of the segregationists.
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@Greyparrot
What if it were a nuclear attack? Would you expect Biden to sit passively at his desk and twiddle his thumbs for two or three weeks while he waited for the surviving members of Congress (holed up in some other bunker) to approve a retaliatory strike?
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This one isn't a mark against Biden. Far from it.
Iran has spent years building a paramilitary network in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and is using it to punish the West for Israel's Gaza offensive. This would've happened regardless of who was president; what's important is that Biden responded in a timely manner. Given that the Houthis have since doubled down on their attacks, I hope that more airstrikes follow.
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It's not an either/or choice. Some level of taxation is inevitable, because some level of government is inevitable. Ideally the latter would not exceed what can be covered.
The rich are getting better and better at finding ways to avoid or minimize federal taxes. Perhaps the GOP makes it easier, but it's lucrative enough that a large industry would spring up without us, and there already is one in the form of tax lawyers. Given that the Feds routinely try to make them pay more than their overall share of the national wealth, there are no moral implications in them trying to pay less. The game, if you would, is amoral. But in any case it's obvious that current levels of spending cannot be sustained through rich tax dollars alone.
We're going to have to cut the Federal budget at some point. The Republican says "Let's do so right now, while we could feasibly recover from the National Debt."
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There are no real winners with the emerging status quo. An increasing number of men are frustrated because their dating prospects are poor if existent at all, a lot of women either become single mothers or have to bear the moral weight of having aborted their own child (and lack an actual loving partner even if they get laid from time to time), a lot of sexually active men and women contract lifelong STDs, and even those lucky few effboys live jaded lives without knowing the happiness of a meaningful, non-superficial relationship.
Because most people aren't winning the love game, I don't believe this is sustainable in the long run. Either there will be a neo-trad generation which rejects the aimlessness of the current one or technology will allow for more satisfying distractions that make single life tolerable for everyone. For example, robots or simulated romantic partners via AI and whatnot. If it boils down to the latter, then fewer and fewer people of either sex will be having live relationships or flings, making the whole "polyamory" thing a moot point.
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It's easy to doctor a study so that it says whatever the politically expedient conclusion is. Pick "a random sample" of some high-income parents with high emotional intelligence, who can successfully raise well-behaved kids without the paddle, and contrast that with another "random sample" of low-income parents with obvious anger issues whose approach to corporal punishment is better described as a beating than a spanking. Poof, science.
All you have to do is ignore two other groups: parents without anger issues who need the paddle to control their kids but don't overdo it, so their kids turn out alright, and parents with low emotional intelligence/motivation as a parent who forego the paddle but whose only alternative is letting the increasingly spoiled brats walk all over them, so their kids grow up to be monsters with severe behavioral issues.
As for a debate, nah. Right now I don't feel like I have enough spare time to dump another commitment onto my plate. But I can discuss it here if you want.
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Get better soon. I don't recall this ever happening to me, but I once ate a flavor of chips (which I'd enjoyed at the time) while sick and I couldn't stand them afterward. Same principle I guess.
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Easy way to end up dead, because on average men are stronger and more aggressive. Their moral inhibitions against killing would be vastly diminished when dealing with a person, perhaps especially a female person, who tried to screw them over like that. And if you leave them a text and a venmo address, then you've left enough information that they may be able to track you down even if you try to keep it anonymous.
And if somehow you get away with it, then you'll have to out yourself in order to accuse them. They probably wouldn't spend all that much time behind bars given the ambiguous circumstances, and afterwards they'd have the rest of their free lives to hunt you down.
If I were a woman, I wouldn't be so dumb as to attempt this.
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@TheUnderdog
The money was taken from the globalist elite silicon valley origarchs and used to fund the mediciaid and education and police services of small town American Patriots
Appeal to the language of class envy and demonizing "the other" is no substitute for a sound argument. A person's rightful property is their rightful property even if you happen to think they have too much.
I will take this to an extreme: during the literal Dark Ages, when landlords collected passive income from the fields and peasants were malnourished despite doing all the work, it was ultimately a good thing they weren't able to overthrow the landlords.
Not good for the average member of that generation, sure. They suffered plain and simple. But in the long run, the inassailability of property rights even when people had 10,000x more legitimate reason to hate the concept than today set a precedent that allowed for the success of capitalism when Europe began urbanizing around the High Middle Ages and afterward. This, I suspect, is also the reason why Japan, feudal until the 19th century, was the first non-European country to successfully modernize.
Americans are richer today than ever. But sure, by some metrics we are currently being "tested" by income inequality and other bad stuff. If we fail the test by doing what seems immediately expedient, our descendants will regret it, assuming that we ourselves won't also. A thousand years of gradually upward momentum will go flying out the window.
I can really see how Scandinavia is a really underdeveloped place
Scandinavian politicians themselves have publicly denied that their countries are socialist. For example, the World Bank reports that Denmark is ranked #4 in ease of doing business (compared to #6 for the US), and Norway and Sweden are #9 and #10, respectively. Similarly this article lists Sweden and Denmark as two of Europe's top tax havens.
As for Norway, they also have a small population and lots of oil money.
What a weird way to support Dr. Fauci.
Believe it or not, I have no problem with Dr. Fauci. The fact that some other republicans cut open their skulls and flushed their brains down the toilet as soon as Covid hit doesn't oblige me to do the same.
What about life from 1940 to 1980? Taxes on the globalists were very high back then and decent technology was still developed.
From everything I've heard, there were a lot of tax loopholes that the rich took advantage of. It's also worth noting that we had like two good decades, immediately following WWII and the Great Depression, and then the economy fell into massive stagnation in the 70s.
This argument can be used to justify extreme corporate welfare. "If we pay people who have a lot of money because they have a lot of money, lets tax everyone at 100% and give all the money to Elon Musk. This way, we encourage people to become as fiscally productive as Elon Musk". I know this isn't your position, but it's the logical conclusion of your position,
No it isn't. Give billionaires free money for no reason and they'll have more money. What's the point of working and investing if the end result will be the same regardless?
And for the most part, what's called "corporate welfare" isn't. Letting someone keep more of their own money isn't welfare. The mental gymnastics needed to justify this way of thinking are insane. As for corporate bailouts, they aren't partisan and President Obama was more than happy to bail out General Motors.
Well with economic theory, the elected left isn't advocating the use of heroin, but instead, the use of something like music; it reduces pain and it's not addictive.
Except government spending is addictive, as I've demonstrated.
That's because the American public is fiscally left wing.
The American public is fiscally selfish. Everyone wants more benefits for themselves. And everyone wants lower taxes for themselves. This is what's popular, and it's also what is destroying us.
Now me personally, if some stranger I know dies from lack of healthcare, I'm fine with that, I prefer tax cuts to saving their life because I don't love the poor enough to be willing to take care of them and their pain is irrelevant to me.
Personally, I think it's hypocritical to call somebody else evil for not wanting to pile on more government debt to service the poor and sick when you yourself give very little if anything to charity. Not calling out you specifically, but the left in general.
How would you cut government spending by $1.7 trillion? Conservatives don't have a plan
If Democrats made a binding promise that: (1). the conservative plan will be implemented; and (2). whatever necessary steps will to be taken to ensure Republicans don't lose any congressional seats in the aftermath of said implementation, then Republicans could come up with a plan in a matter of weeks or months. It's strictly because of Dems' refusal and willingness to electorally profit from unpopular reforms that Republicans haven't done so.
The vast majority of this debt was because Reagan cut taxes for the globalists and every president (democrat and republican) since then has followed suit.
The vast majority of the debt is because spending gets approved with full knowledge that enough taxes won't be collected to make up the difference. The most I'm willing to concede is that both parties have blame, and I'm of the disposition that the lion's share of said blame falls on Democrats. But if I'm wrong about that, then it still isn't a Republican-exclusive blame.
More taxes means a smaller debt (assuming government spending stays constant).
That may be true for one year. Or two. Or three. But eventually it'll mean an appetite for more spending, since lawmakers would now perceive that they can get away with it. Again, the federal budget is like heroin. Maybe you start out taking a pill four times a week or whatever. But eventually you'll be injecting it into your veins like twice a day.
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@TheUnderdog
I'll put this another way.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that it makes immediate utilitarian sense to redistribute wealth from the rich and put it into welfare. That still doesn't mean it's a good idea.
That's like me saying: "Hey look, using heroin one time will be an amazing euphoric experience, despite the downsides of repeated use, so the most rational thing is for everybody to try heroin once and never again." What this misses is that our behaviors are habit-shaping and character-forming. If we cross the line into trying heroin once, then we're at risk of trying it again. And again. And again.
And if we cross the line of disregarding property rights once, and if we scapegoat a few rich people and confiscate 50% of all their stuff as an act of compassion for the poor, then cross our fingers and say "We promise we won't do it again, it was a one time thing because the poor needed us to do it", then who would believe us? How could we restrain ourselves from doing it again? What self-control would we have?
I mean, think about it. Every time a new welfare program (e.g. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP, etc) is put in, it becomes politically unthinkable to not reauthorize funding for it each subsequent year. The popular appetite for dole money never shrinks. It only grows. Forever and ever more, even as fewer and fewer people are actually paying for these programs.
We're now more than $30 trillion in debt. That number will only continue to mushroom out of control. Because at some point our ancestors made the "utilitarian" choice and compromised their moral character, and now we their descendants can't shake the habit either.
The only way to avoid this is to uphold property rights and trim the size of the government beast even when it hurts. Even when it's hard and will make life harder for many people in the short term.
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@TheUnderdog
To be left wing is to be against people enduring pain that they don't want to endure... If the GOP takes the opposite approach, it either means they would support people enduring pain that they don't want to endure either for pure sadism or for a consistent reason (that I'm trying to find out).
This is political messaging. Nobody in either party has said: "Manna is coming down from heaven and providing for everyone's needs, in limitless quantities and with no strings attached, but we're such HUMBUGS who hate the poor that we'll make sure they can't tap into it!"
Anything that can be distributed to the masses was taken from somebody else, either with or without their consent (i.e. theft). There are no free lunches except for those freely given.
What can be done is to expand the size of the economic pie. I'll give you a hypothetical.
Suppose that it's the year 1890. You seize control of America at gunpoint and proclaim: "Come all ye poor, I will give you free food and free housing." The urban and rural poor are given dirty cots to stay in, free of charge, and barely expired gruel to eat, three meals a day. They get a bar of soap a month to clean their five pairs of clothing, and a free sewing kit to patch up whatever holes emerge in their clothes. They get a free cow and a free milking pail. They get free crutches whenever they catch polio. House visits by their leech doctor who balances their humors by draining blood and black bile are free of charge.
In short, let's say you have redistributed all of the resources in 1890 America "equitably". The price, in this hypothetical, is that, 134 years later in 2024, they're still living the same way. No private property means little to no economic growth. Think North Korea.
Now, imagine the average poor person in today's America, real life. By American standards, their lives aren't very good. But that's because we keep setting the bar higher and higher and higher. What would their ancestors in 1890 say if they could see it?
They'd conclude that the poorest (non-homeless) Americans, who can eat a huge variety of meals and drink beer while watching TV in their air-conditioned living room, were inoculated against many deadly illnesses as children, and only work 40 hours a week on a job which isn't back-breaking labor in the fields or factories, are living like royalty. And they'd be right, minus the palaces.
You might think this is an extreme hypothetical, and you'd be right. 90% of Democrats aren't literal communists. Nonetheless, anything that negatively skews the cost-benefit of putting in effort and resources ("conducting commerce") to turn a profit will harm the economy through disincentivizing commerce. So-called progressive taxes do this, as do NIMBY-style restrictions on doing business. It's common sense that penalizing something will get you less of it, and rewarding something will get you more of it.
These things add up over great stretches of time. For example, if country A had a GDP growth rate of 2.5% over 100 years, and country B had a rate of 3.5%, and assuming they started out with evenly matched economies, then 100 years later the average citizen of country B will have nearly 3x as much wealth as their counterpart across the border. The difference between 2.5% and 3.5% doesn't seem that big, but the consequences can be dramatic. And no, this is not fiction or a hypothetical. This has played itself out across the world the past 100 years and will continue to do so in the future.
Let's say free market capitalism by itself cannot lift a given person out of poverty. That's a big if, but just for the sake of argument. Even if that's true, then his suffering is not "for no reason" but so that his children and grandchildren will enjoy a better standard of living than he ever did.
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The GOP is America's right-wing party, just as the Democratic Party is America's left-wing party. And yes, America has both a right and a left, as the political spectrum is subjective and varies by country. Europe is not the objective benchmark handed down to us from heaven and much of Asia has mainstream politics which are far more reactionary than the GOP ever was and ever will be. Likewise, there are reactionary parties in Europe itself which have achieved mainstream success as of late, such as the Sweden Democrats and AfD in Sweden and Germany respectively, and more generally in countries like Russia, Belarus, Serbia, and Hungary.
The GOP's name, "Republican Party", comes from the fact that America is a constitutional republic. A republic is a rules-based system of government that balances the need for democratic representation with allowing whatever group is in the majority at a given time to destroy neither stable rules, nor freedom and civil rights, nor political and cultural pluralism. Representation within a republic is as much about the right to veto as it is about the positive right to govern, as even uncomfortable compromises mean that everyone can basically live with the final outcome.
Our republic is a mixture of "novel 18th century political experiment", thousand year old norms and traditions which we inherited from countries like England, and countless innovations made in the past 200+ years.
In the mid-20th century the GOP underwent an ideological synthesis and has since constituted a "three-legged" coalition between proponents of economic liberalism, foreign policy hawks, and Christian conservatives. At the time all of these interests converged in the form of a communist threat, but post-1991 different factions have vied for power. Post-2016 all three of these groups have taken a backseat and a fourth faction, defined by opposition to mass (especially illegal) immigration, backlash against recent gender and racial identitarian movements on the left, and skepticism of left-controlled institutions, has been largely embodied in the person of Donald Trump.
At present the party doesn't have a clear identity. Just about everyone can agree on what they're opposed to, but their next blueprint for how to reform the country has yet to be written. Notably the GOP did not release an official platform in 2020, and it's unclear if they will in 2024 either.
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I mean, there are crazy people in America saying stuff like this who are from Christian backgrounds they haven't formally renounced. Why's it different when said crazy person happens to have a Jewish background?
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@FLRW
All of the several thousand people present were involved in constructing a gallows?
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Since I can no longer edit my first post, I'll add this:
If Biden loses, I anticipate that some left-wing brownshirt groups might riot a little but this would be restricted to big cities where I don't live, and it shouldn't last very long, so I'm not personally worried about that.
Basically we're at a stage of sheer bitterness where it's "damned if you do, damned if you don't". But that's not to say all outcomes are equally bad. Admittedly there is some temporarily heightened degree of risk to our republic if Trump wins, but assuming he dies/retires on cue it's also the scenario that gives us the best long-term odds of avoiding a one-party state. Things have escalated too far for us to have the luxury of playing it safe, nominating someone else, and passively onlooking as the system metaphorically buttrapes the former president.
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It's worth noting that Trump is barely younger than Biden, America's oldest president ever. Trump is obese and has led a hedonistic lifestyle from cradle to near-grave. I don't see him being around longer than one more presidential term, assuming he can finish that without dying. Even if somehow he had both the will and the means at his disposal to suspend elections and keep ruling indefinitely post-January 2029, it's questionable if he'd be alive to carry this out, or stay in good enough health to keep going as opposed to just retiring.
The GOP's long-term forecasts should be planning for a future after Trump, not a future with Trump still in it.
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If Trump wins, this will come to an end.
The elites have thrown everything at Trump they can possibly throw. If they succeed, they could hypothetically try the same thing against Trump's successor, even if he's a vanilla moderate with a relatively spotless record like Mitt Romney. But if they fail here, there's zero possibility of it working on a future Mitt Romney guy and the Republican Party post-Trump will be safe from its candidates being successfully prosecuted as punishment for running for/holding office as a conservative. The elites will observe the limit of Democrat power and conclude that their political strategy of exclusively backing Dems isn't more profitable than hedging their bets between the two parties, so Republicans will reap a windfall.
Trump wouldn't be in a position to try January 6 again if he loses, since he isn't President and Congress wouldn't go along with it, but he probably has enough clout to incite civil unrest through a bunch of incendiary tweets. The elites are key beneficiaries of the current regime and are unlikely to try to destabilize it when they could simply adapt to a President Trump. Biden himself, I think, is tired and would rather step down peacefully than try to fight a dangerous fight.
The final question is one of Trump's retaliation if he wins. I don't see this happening violently, but it could mean the "2025 plan" or whatever it's called. As for this I wouldn't be too worried. Trump was barely able to finish like 1/4th of the wall's length if that. Sweepingly ambitious plans mean little when you lack the means to pull them off. Trump's first two years saw a GOP majority in both houses of Congress and they still didn't want to cooperate with him more than they had to. Imagine if there's a split Congress, or heaven forbid, a Dem majority in both. If Trump is able to put some aspects of this plan into effect, we can assume that he has the rightful legal authority to do so and it wouldn't amount to a coup.
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Cool. Here's my list:
Movies:
1. Birth of a Nation
2. The Room
3. 120 Days of Sodom
Anime:
1. Boku no Pico
2. Oreimo
3. Redo of Healer
4. One Piece
TV Shows:
1. Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood
2. Super Why
3. Tomorrow's Pioneers
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It's pretty unfair to have been born with a slew of mental illnesses.
That being said, it's also pretty unfair to have been born in the late 20th/early 21st century, have access to the internet, and enjoy a surplus of leisure time not dedicated to sheer survival that can be spent arguing petty nonsense on the internet. The vast majority of humans who've ever lived would think this an unfathomable privilege.
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There's like one Muslim guy here who's getting wolfpacked, so I don't want to pile on to that. Here are a few quick thoughts:
Neither faith is founded in "reason" but in revelation.
I'll agree it's unreasonable to assume that God always had a human form from whenever He first came into existence (if such a point can be said to exist), but it's not unreasonable to assume that God could wed a part of Himself to the human form. The question here becomes: what are the limits of what God can hypothetically do to Himself? And the correct answer is "we don't know". To assert that God couldn't make Himself human or into a Trinity is just that: an unproven and unproveable assertion. Just as much as it's an assertion that God can and did do such. Neither Christianity nor Islam came into existence because some brilliant philosopher reasoned his way into it but because, both allege, God revealed certain otherwise unknowable knowledge to mankind.
The New Testament's strength, I think, lies in how little it said. Paul was given a mission to preach the Gospel, but he wasn't given perfect knowledge of what the ideal culture or form of government ought to look like. And he didn't pretend that he knew. There were generalities like "be moral as opposed to immoral", but this allowed for improvements in our collective understanding of what morality looked like. Paul didn't outright say "abolish slavery" but at the same time he didn't say not to abolish slavery. A Christian society wasn't impeded from adapting on this issue because of its Christian faith.
In short, its authors didn't demand "all Christians from now onward must live EXACTLY like 1st century Eastern Mediterranean Greeks did!" Which is good, because after a while Christians were no longer living in a 1st century Hellenic civilization.
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@Best.Korea
Well, is it voluntary or not? Because if its voluntary, I wont participate, and if its not voluntary, then I cant refuse to participate.
This doesn't exist. It's just a cool idea I've got in my head.
But if it did, then voluntary. Most people who signed up would do so because they'd realize that they're getting older but not getting anywhere in life they haven't been before.
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@blamonkey
I think you could be more specific on how this programmatic civicism would bridge theory and praxis.
Here"theory" refers simply the idea that the average citizen ought to improve substantially more than they usually will in their lifetime and at a substantially faster rate of progress. It's not like I'm smart enough to write a Marxian theoretical exploration of the concepts described here. It's all pretty basic stuff.
If "praxis" is taken to mean how this ideal is to be realized in practice, then the core question is how to actually motivate people to do what they have the head knowledge to do but probably won't.
Programmatic Civicism's selling point is that, if said program came into existence, undermotivated people could say "I give you permission to make me do what I know I ought to be doing". Right now there's no widely available option to that effect in American society. If it did exist, and if most people could be convinced to utilize it, and if the execution was effective, then said abridgement would occur.
It would help to describe precisely what this civic therapy is meant to fix. Is it... everything up to and including "negative personality traits?"
The assumption here is that self-improvement is a life-long journey, but that certain things take immediate priority. One could search for other things to improve once those priorities have been sufficiently met. Hypothetically, given an unlimited amount of time, that could mean "everything", but of course people don't have an unlimited amount of time. And self-improvement would have to be tempered against such realities as people needing breaks and time off.
I can see how this model could fit leftist and right-leaning (rightist?) political projects, but I think you might overstate the model's applicability
I'm not confidently claiming that there is no political ideology this would be incompatible with. But your average liberal, conservative, Christian, atheist, Jew, Muslim, libertarian, nationalist, communist, anarchist, fascist, or socialist could find some coherent iteration of these ideas that was amenable to their existing belief systems.
I don't see how someone like Ayn Rand would be able to support any version of programmatic civicism in the manner you describe because programmatic civicism imposes a significant moral burden on subjects
From what little I've read, Ayn Rand took selfishness and lack of altruistic regard for others to be a positive moral good to be encouraged. Programmatic Civicism, in contrast, does have a moral center. That being said, very few Americans are Objectivists.
programmatic civicism imposes a significant moral burden on subjects
It's long-accepted in Western philosophy that, within rational limits, being a good person can increase one's own happiness.
Goals like "I want to go from my current gig as a janitor at IBM to one of their programmers" can be thought of as selfish, discounting the greater value added to society by more skilled labor than less skilled labor. Sure. But once you've done that, once your salary has improved to the point where you can afford your own house and you're no longer stressed out by bills you struggle to pay, going for more and more money will eventually yield diminishing returns when it comes to happiness added to your life. Once you arrive at that point, the optimal pursuit of further happiness would mean branching out and finding other goals, such as finding purpose in making the world a better place.
I'd argue that, so long as the group doesn't pressure you into altruism before your lower needs are met, but instead waits until the appropriate time, then they aren't working against you to your detriment but for you to your benefit. As for when certain conversations should and shouldn't happen, the group(s) would need to work out its norms and protocols through discussion and experience.
programmatic civicism ...embraces a communitarian, non-individualistic, manner of living
This is half-true. Programmatic Civicism's aim would be to achieve individual goals through the collective structure. For those initial 90 days you'd have minimal freedom and would have to live in an intentional community, but that's a small fraction of your overall lifespan.
People under programmatic civicism are forced into "accountability" groups, life partnerships, and reciprocal-care relations with people not of their choosing
Fair enough. Obviously there wouldn't be GIs pointing a gun to your head and forcing you to keep participating for life even if you decide not to, but I can understand how "it can be hard to leave" something you've been involved with for a long time.
Example: Since the therapy session you describe is not chaired by a leader, the rules are "pre-established" - but pre-established by who?
Somebody would have to get the ball rolling. And yes, there'd be potential for that person to exercise undue influence over the group. Related to the point of myth-making, ideally there would be a myth that the person who founded the group and drafted its rules was somebody else, and that that person stepped away forever after doing so once. The founder, per this myth, would be one member out of many, bound to the decided-on rules to the same degree as anyone else and unable to amend them further.
I'll use the Founding Fathers for analogy; once they ratified the Constitution, they couldn't snap their fingers and decide to undo it. It was done and out of their hands.
The program also encourages an "intensive" accountability group program - that's fine - but it also means having the capacity to know and sanction non-compliance with the rules
The highest leverage that the group would have, assuming you don't consent to be punished by it, would be expulsion or suspension from its ranks.
but then people could plausibly never consent to punishment, defanging the whole operation.
The reason most people would consent is because they know it's in their rational long-term best interests to do so. Having a lot of bad habits and a wimpy character causes one to make overall less-rational choices because it's more expedient to do so in the short-term; the 90 days would serve, through instilling a tougher character and better habits, to empower one to act on their rational impulses as opposed to their irrational ones.
The question I haven't yet answered is how one could force compliance with the program during those 90 days. This period would have to be more coercive than that afterward. Morally I have fewer qualms with this so long as the initial decision to do the 90 days was freely made. In terms of how this wouldn't be illegal (that is, not kidnapping), I suppose the participant could be made to sign a binding contract as a condition of taking part.
I'm not too sure what needs to be changed about citizens to make them "better."
Make people who are more competent in holding down jobs, learning how to perform new jobs, navigating the market to find jobs, networking with people to find business opportunities, making better grades in college and retaining more info, having a greater interest in spending one's leisure time on intellectual pursuits and learning as opposed to watching reality TV or video gaming, eating better, sleeping better, being physically fitter, not smoking or overconsuming alcohol, being more outgoing and social, asking that girl out instead of being too shy, volunteering and/or serving as a community leader, etc. These are some pretty common-sense definitions that most people wouldn't object to.
Is it that we want them to become more moderate? Less polarized? I'm not sure, and I'm less sure if "less polarized" (if that is what "better" means within this context) is good
My position is that, as confident as you and I both are in the candidates we vote for on election day, we don't have the wisdom to make truly good political choices. A virtuous public would. As for what their politics would look like, we can't know yet.
This intervention seems designed to ameliorate conflict (or at least, "calling out,") in a manner that hampers legitimate conflict between people.
Fair enough, I guess.
Camaraderie is not the baseline of democratic experience.
Also fair.
A ninety-day retreat is unworkable within my schedule. I would imagine for most people, a ninety-day retreat is unworkable.
Taking 90 days off work amounts to accepting unemployment in most cases. We already accept this as a sacrifice worth making in contexts like higher education; for example, if you're spending 20-25 hours a week in class plus homework, then you're not likely to concurrently be able to hold a stable 50-hour-a-week job. Unlike college, you would typically have no living expenses during the retreat. Enough provisions to not die would be procured ahead of time and then you'd stay there and rough it out. They would live in a tent and eat dried food.
I'm not going to pretend that everyone's life circumstances could accommodate this exact setup. The particular scheme I have in mind is best suited for young men without family to support. Since that's what I am, that's my life experience, and that's the demographic I'd target if I were to ever seriously attempt this myself. But I'm sure that different program designs could be drafted to meet the needs of other segments of America.
On a related note, are we assuming that people already have business connections before being thrust in the wilderness?
We aren't. The point of the retreat isn't to make connections there, but to get you up to a level of competency where you can go establish connections in the workplace.
And if the group's well-established and successful, then the person inducting you into the group could hook you up with people. I'm envisioning a hierarchical structure that goes like this:
Bob: Inducted 10 guys, including Bruce
Bruce: Inducted 10 guys, including Kevin
Kevin: Inducted 10 guys, including Mike
Suppose one of Bob's guys is well-suited to enter into a commercial partnership with Mike. It'd take 3 conversations for Mike to be hooked up with that guy: Mike asks his immediate higher-up Kevin, who asks his immediate higher-up Bruce, who knows one of the guys initiated with him who currently has the desirable credentials.
The group's structure would be internally easy to visualize, making it simple to navigate. And unlike, say, browsing LinkedIn, embedded in these 3 conversations would be Kevin vouching (or declining to vouch) that Mike's a solid guy who would be a reliable partner, a dynamic you don't get on the internet.
Another problem I foresee is that some people are just more skeptical of mythopoetic principles being espoused.
I envision the mythopoeia as being something that you're exposed to during the initiation. For those willing to believe, it's a bonus thrown in to "sweeten the deal" of living a disciplined life. But if you don't believe it, then you might still participate by virtue of it being the rational choice.
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[1]. The human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times during the average person's lifespan. If it has a mechanical failure at any point, you will die, yet the average age of first heart attack is 65 for males and 72 for females.
There is no repairman who sticks his hand inside your ribcage and does maintenance on it. For most people it has no mid-lifecycle cleaning or part replacement. Even so, the longest lived person was 122 years old at time of death. In contrast, this 2016 article was like "Wow, so impressive!" because a person had recently survived a total of 555 days (about 1.5 years) with an artificial heart using the latest technology.
In this day and age, our best technology cannot match the performance of the average human heart. This will change eventually, but just consider how many decades of R&D have gone into getting the artificial heart up to where it is today, and how much more will be required to get it up to that level. The human heart, in contrast, was allegedly not designed by anyone.
[2]. Various cited evidences for a "fine-tuned universe", such as life being impossible or nearly impossible if certain scientific equations had different values than they do in reality.
[3]. The hard problem of consciousness still has no answer in 2023. The brain's parts together have an undeniable synergistic effect that can't be explained; neurologists know enough to explain the machinery that enables a "philosophical zombie", but not how said machinery amounts to something which is greater than a philosophical zombie.
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@sadolite
There are no solutions to anything, just trade offs.
That's true with normal politics. But what I'm proposing is as close to a win-win as one could get. The trade-off is that you sacrifice three months of your life, and that afterward you can't live in as laid-back a manner as you did before. But for a lot of people this would be a small price to pay for breaking into the middle-class, having a wife and lots of friends, and being in good shape at 60.
And if you happen to not think it's worth the price, then just say no to the recruiters who represent these groups.
For example: Do you want the homeless to live in the streets down town in front of businesses thus driving away business or do you want them outside of town in the woods.
Programmatic Civicism picks the third option: cure their mental and behavioral issues which made them homeless in the first place.
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This is an introduction to Programmatic Civicism, which is my highest political ideology. It doesn't come up in my daily posts here when I'm in "Those dagnab liberals suck for X or Y reason" mode, but it's the highest political ideal that I would like to see pursued. It is both an ideal and a feasible possibility, because Programmatic Civicism describes a tangible method of arriving at that ideal.
At the foundation of Programmatic Civicism is the following principle: that in order to build a better society, one should make better people who together comprise that society. Depending on the role you see for government in making a better society, you might disagree that this is the exclusive means of doing so. But I think everyone, left or right, can agree that it would be a huge step in the right direction if realized. Thus, Programmatic Civicism is not inherently a left or right wing ideology. It could either belong to whatever camp a given adherent happens to fall into, or it could lie outside the left-right spectrum altogether.
But there lies the problem which it aims to solve: how do you realize the ideal you have in your head? Isn't that ideal most likely to remain a product of one's imagination and never become anything more?
In short, how do you bridge the gaping divide between theory and practice?
To answer this question, Programmatic Civicism has the following prescriptions:
1. Setting aside lofty questions of free will and individual responsibility, it accomplishes nothing to tell a man who's lapsed into poor behavioral and decision-making patterns "Shame on you, you b*stard!" and not offer him the means of getting better. Rehab isn't exclusively the domain of drug addicts but of criminals, underachievers, the undereducated, overeaters, the sedentary, people who harm their relationships with family, those with other negative personality traits, etc.
2. In a subversion of conventional wisdom, the hypocrite is a myth rather than a true villain.
It is always easier to give advice than to follow it yourself, and it's easier to be motivated to take hard action by someone else's compulsion than it is to motivate yourself. Rather than obstinately braying "HYPOCRITE! HYPOCRITE!" when someone tries to help you accomplish something that they haven't, the smart person would see this as a psychology hack which can be exploited. Instead of the masses listening passively to the instruction of a guru who has to pretend he's perfect (until some investigative journalists prove he isn't and the entire thing crumbles like a house of cards), two unmotivated people can "teach" one another to rise to the level of competency that they themselves would like to attain. The accountability group structure is where the most potential for improvement lies, and everyone in society ought to be plugged into such.
3. The accountability group structure needs to be designed well to produce good results. Were this not the case, anyone who attended regular AA meetings would be a well-adjusted, highly productive member of society (and we know they often aren't), since Alcoholics Anonymous has a sort of accountability group structure. A design, which I call a "program", should have many rules and protocols tailored to yield results. Below, I will list some design principles of a program that's in line with Programmatic Civicism:
3.1. Hard rehab
Metaphorically speaking, when neurons in your brain fire according to a certain habit, you "tread that path with a wheelbarrow" and "wear a groove" in the road, making it hard to turn left or right the next time. Which is to say that behavior, when repeated, reinforces itself as a habit. It took a great deal of time and repetition to arrive at the lifestyle a person is living now, so it will take a great deal of time and repetition to replace it with something healthier.
In drug rehab, the "gold standard" is 90 days, because this loosely corresponds to the amount of time needed to make or break a habit. With that much time, one can arrive at the ability to live every day without that to which they were accustomed.
3.2. Mythopoeia
What hard rehab does is establish a new "baseline" for one's behavior. But it doesn't shield one from temptations to relapse upon returning to society. For this, they need a reason to avoid doing so.
Self-improvement movements are known to utilize mythopoeia, which is a fancy word for myth-making. There's an entire Wikipedia article on the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, which thrived around the 1980s and 1990s. If you've watched enough Vice documentaries on YouTube, you may be familiar with the type: men are in a wilderness retreat with pseudo-Indian vibes, somebody beats on a drum, misquotes Carl Jung, and says something like "You've completed your hero's journey. Peter Pan has grown up from a boy into a proper man. Congratulations."
Basically, these programs used the power of suggestion to convince attendees "My life has been changed by the 48 hours I spent here", in the hopes that that belief would help the personal benefits the program aimed to impart stick. It wasn't different in principle from the proverbial 30 year old alcoholic felon who found Christ, turned his entire life around, and broke into the middle class with a wife and kids by age 45.
Of course, the self-improvement industry is rife with charlatans and perverse incentives, such as making fortunes by selling the temporary feeling of transformation and personal growth in lieu of its actual substance. Additionally 48 hours of indoctrination isn't enough time to make someone truly believe that the idea being suggested is true. But the point here is that a "rehab program" combined with believable and inspiring "myths" can give a graduate reason to stick with it afterwards.
The third and final step is the day-to-day accountability group. When done intensively, and when underpinned by the aforementioned two steps, the result can be an upward spiral for most people enrolled in said program. This would, just to be clear, be a program one is part of for life, though certain steps like rehab would be one-time only. It would occupy a great deal of one's time and energy and would rise to the level of a religious cult, though without a charismatic leader who can abuse and exploit the flock.
To tie it altogether, here is a specific example of how such a program would be organized:
You are invited to a 90-day wilderness retreat where you eat right, sleep right, live according to a schedule, exercise your body, exercise your mind, and have nothing to entertain you besides a larger-than-life message that seems to have reached you from a supernatural place of origin. Then you go home and are part of the group for life. It is leaderless and its members are governed by a pre-established set of rules. Everyone has an accountability partner, with whom they discuss things over the phone and in person, set plausible weekly, monthly, and yearly goals for life improvement, and are disciplined by (to the level of severity that one consents to) if they fail to meet those goals. Ideally, one would live with his accountability partner so that the two of them are constantly in touch. There's no need for a big commune; a group of two or three living together in an apartment is enough.
For most people, the first priority would be career. They'd aim to break into more economically productive jobs and make more money. Next would be things like being healthy, and then one's relationships with friends and family, then broader philanthropy, and finally miscellaneous personal issues or goals. The group would constitute a web of interpersonal connections through which people can get to know each other and find likeminded business partners. Motivated by an outpouring of friendship and generosity between men, there would be a sharing of advanced technical knowledge needed to build a 21st century economy, keep the US competitive with foreign powers like China, and grow GDP large enough to keep the national debt from swallowing us whole.
In short, a well-designed program that takes off and reaches this country's 300,000,000 citizens could basically solve our problems and save us from pending national collapse.
As for what precisely this "well-designed program" would be, it depends on who's founding such a group. The best way forward is for many different groups to be founded with many different approaches, in the hope that one of them actually takes off and transforms America. These groups should be volunteer-run and not money-making enterprises. Members should pay no dues to an organization, much less to a singular person. Greed is a cancer which has infested, tainted, and destroyed the whole reputation of the self-help industry, and it is a pitfall the Programmatic Civicist would do best to avoid if he wishes to succeed where all others before him have failed.
Anyway, this is it.
I'm not delusional enough to think that my average post here on DART, or previously on DDO, has been of any real value to the world. But in this forum thread, I think, has been put forward a truly novel idea that's never been strung together by anyone else in exactly this form. All I can ask you to do is read this and judge for yourself whether or not Programmatic Civicism has serious merit to it.
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In my view, liberals actually would have a lot to contribute to this country if their passion and zeal for improving society was guided in the right direction.
The right direction is campaigning and struggling to change the behavior of ordinary individuals in some positive direction: eating right, staying in shape, giving more to charity, not turning a blind eye to the plight of your neighbor, support groups for people with mental health challenges, lowering your carbon and environmental footprint, etc. Things that make a real difference without violating boundaries of consent. If they encouraged people to do better without forcing or effectively forcing them to, then I wouldn't complain. In fact, I might even join them in making a better world.
The problem here is that the bulk of your list involves the government forcing people to behave X or Y way, or robbing them of money that belongs to them through undue taxation (for example, that which exceeds a flat tax rate). This violates human rights, such as property rights, and human freedom.
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There is no simple way to run a country. Simple slogans are good for getting elected but not for governing.
Here's how it actually works: lawmakers spend months, sometimes years, and countless man hours, crafting bills which will make a few surgical changes to some obscure, complicated working of the government. The end result, if implemented well, is that the government does a marginally better at helping society than it did before. Through a very large number of successful changes, you start to see a noticeable improvement in the way things are.
Generalities like "hospitals have duty to provide service for free to those who cant afford it" can't be left as generalities. In practice, this means either some greatly expanded Medicaid-for-all scheme or nationalizing hospitals so that they're public employees.
If the former, you add to the Federal budget, which is already running a deficit. If the latter, then hospitals aren't fee collection points for services rendered; the USFG must get better at more generally collecting taxes from elsewhere (hint: it's not very good at this). Additionally the USFG must either bump the pay of doctors to compensate them for the significantly greater amount of work they'll be doing, or it can hire more doctors to cover said workload (there's already a growing personnel shortage in the industry so this isn't a viable option). Either way, more will have to be spent on healthcare than at present. A third option, of course, is to ration the availability of healthcare to everyone else so that the existing pool of doctors and nurses can spend more time on the poor.
As the old saying goes, "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
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Hey look, we kind of agree on the second one.
I don't think public schools should be done away with altogether, but they should be a default option that's available if there are no alternatives. An education that can truly be called religiously neutral is hard to pull off, and the current public system is nowhere remotely close to being there, meaning "secularism" as currently defined is a farce. It's state promotion of one POV with profound religious implications, which is fine so long as the state is equally willing to promote over POVs with religious implications. Such as religious schools. Both should be eligible for taxpayer funding.
On #11, I think there's a place for contracting out public functions to the private sector. But I also want some of the reverse: the government being involved in the normal production, acquisition, and sale of consumer products to break up unhealthy monopolies when the markets are moving too slow to help consumers out. Not the usual "we'll do this for free" nonsense but the lowest retail price that can reasonably be sustained without killing the business model.
My thinking is divided into "knee-jerk tribal politics" and "principled ideologies I might espouse in an ideal world if I wasn't knee-deep in tribal politics".
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@Best.Korea
Did you know that during Trump, USA had 3rd highest in the world death rate from covid?
I was paying attention to Covid death rates during the height of the pandemic. I don't recall everything that I found back then, but it seemed America's situation wasn't exceptionally bad at the time. I think our standing got a little worse sometime after Biden took office, but again, I don't have a source for that.
Here are some recent figures.
As of May 2023, the US had 1,161,164 recorded Covid deaths. The UK had 223,396. A lot smaller number, right? Yes, but we have 5x the population of the UK. 5 x 223,396 is 1,116,980. Meaning we have proportionately more deaths per capita than the UK, but just slightly so. The UK, suffice to say, is a pretty liberal country and their most conservative mainstream politican is probably equivalent to the average Democrat in the US.
And again, the reason for the somewhat higher American death rate boils down to factors like the notoriously unhealthy American lifestyle along with vaccine hesitancy. Which, despite what media propaganda will tell you, is not actually a partisan issue and many people of color, such as Blacks who vote Democrat, were also skeptical of the vaccine.
Do you know how many countries are involved in Ukraine?
How many are sending money and weapons? A lot. How many countries are actually fighting there? Two.
Trump was forced to sign trillions of dollars of aid to Americans because his free market idea of economy failed.
You mean as a response to anti-free market lockdowns which harmed the economy by keeping people from going to work? No sh!t Sherlock. What other kind of impact could that have on the economy?
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@Best.Korea
Trump also robbed millions from healthcare, and Biden fixed economy during world war. I think a world war is worse than covid.
There is no "world war". A number of miscellaneous wars happening at once does not a world war make.
Rather, we cannot fathom the horrors that WW3 would unleash upon humanity. If it truly came to that, Hitler would look like Mother Teresa compared to Putin, Biden, and Xi.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Bullshit, rates were up because inflation was up. The fed was fighting inflation caused by Reagan’s massive tax cuts.
Rates were rising before Reagan took office and began a permanent downward trend around May of 1982. By late October of 1982, rates were below what they were when Reagan took office. This "inflation caused by Reagan's massive tax cuts", if real in the slightest, didn't hurt mortgage rates for very long.
Mortgage rates were uncommonly low from 2008 through 2020 thanks to the two massive economic collapses caused by Bush and Trump.
Mortgage rates also fell throughout the 90s. And they were also slightly lower when Obama left office than when Obama took office. I suppose that every U.S. President from Reagan until Biden caused "massive economic collapses"?
Bush’s caused by 9/11
You're unironically claiming that Bush caused 9/11?
then the housing bubble and deregulation of Wall Street
The Great Recession was started by the collapse of the housing market, which began with the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. To quote a website administered by the Federal Reserve:
"The subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–10 stemmed from an earlier expansion of mortgage credit, including to borrowers who previously would have had difficulty getting mortgages, which both contributed to and was facilitated by rapidly rising home prices."
The American Enterprise Institute blames the Clinton Administration, which "exploit(ed) a minor provision in a 1977 housing bill, the Community Reinvestment Act, that simply required banks to meet local credit needs. Bank regulators began to pressure banks to make subprime loans. Guidelines became mandates as each bank was assigned a letter grade on CRA loans. Banks could not even open ATMs or branches, much less acquire another bank, without a passing grade—and getting a passing grade was no longer about meeting local credit needs...Effective in January 1993, the 1992 housing bill required Fannie and Freddie to make 30% of their mortgage purchases affordable-housing loans. The quota was raised to 40% in 1996, 42% in 1997, and in 2000 the Department of Housing and Urban Development ordered the quota raised to 50%. The Bush administration continued to raise the affordable-housing goals. Freddie and Fannie dutifully met those goals each and every year until the subprime crisis erupted. By 2008, when both government-sponsored enterprises collapsed, the quota had reached 56%."
The most you can say about Bush is that he didn't put a stop to this. Which I guess is a fair criticism, but it's far more politically costly to kill an entrenched, popular program than to prevent a new one from being authorized. Same reason Republicans don't dare touch Social Security and whatnot.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Trumps botched response to the pandemic and poor leadership is what killed the economy and over 1 million Americans.
Tell that to the slew of Western countries with similar outcomes, controlling for preexisting factors like the less healthy lifestyles Americans tend to live. Or did Trump's "poor leadership" skills magically rub off on every other Western head of state?
Obama had 2 pandemics but they were handled competently so there was very little damage done.
LMAO are you seriously comparing the swine flu or whatnot to Covid?
There were viral outbreaks across the world from 2009 to 2017, but nothing that combined the relative lethality and sheer ease of transmissibility of Covid. Ebola, for example, was deadly but not all that hard to contain even for dysfunctional African governments.
Inflation was low because unemployment was high and interest rates were low because the economy was in recession.
Unemployment was 6.3% by the end of January 2021, a month Trump was president for most of. 6.3% is high compared to right before Covid, but also lower than unemployment during any month in 2013, a year we don't tend to remember as being hellish. As for the technical definition of a recession, which is "a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters", GDP saw growth in Q3 and Q4 of 2020, along with Q1 of 2021, meaning it wasn't in recession at the time when Trump left office.
Meanwhile, in that same month (January 2021), mortgage interest rates were around 2.77 percent. Which, again, was a lot lower than it is today.
Likewise, in January of '21 the monthly 12-month inflation rate was 1.4%. Which is low compared to what it's been in every month since.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Mortgages under Ronald Reagan were as high as 18% and you idiots think he was the greatest President ever
Check the graph again. Interest rates had been on an upward climb for the past decade before Reagan took office. There was a spike to 18 percent early in his Presidency, but this could be seen as a continuation of the economic crisis he inherited.
What's important is that by the end of his presidency, interest rates were 4 points lower than when he began his presidency, instead of being higher like what'd happened under Ford, Carter, and possibly Nixon. Reagan was the president whose leadership commenced the permanent downward spiral of mortgage interest rates, which went mostly uninterrupted for the next 30+ years.
If you want to argue that low mortgage interest rates are a bad thing, then by all means. Blame Reagan. Otherwise...
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@Best.Korea
Trump "screwed up" the economy by happening to be President when a once-in-a-hundred-years global frigging pandemic set in?
Sounds more to me like the US government of that time, whose executive head was Trump, took what had the potential to be worse than the 2008 Great Recession and made it into a relatively moderate downturn. In this regard they evidently succeeded, and both consumer inflation and mortgage interest rates stayed reasonably low until after Biden took office.
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@Best.Korea
So your perspective is limited to just one thing?
No, but this is a pretty huge one. Homeownership is, in America, the traditional signifier of "having achieved middle class". That homeownership is now out of reach for most Americans around the age of 35-40 is a sure sign that the middle class is dying.
Biden unemployment rate: 3 %; Trump unemployment rate: 16 %
Unemployment did temporarily skyrocket to 14.7% during April 2020, which was the height of Covid (a global pandemic) and its lockdowns (a global economic downturn). By the time Trump left office 9 months later, that'd been slashed more than in half, down to 6.3%, which is by far the fastest economic recovery in American history as measured by unemployment.
Which is to say Biden merely inherited that downward trend and has succeeded in not screwing it up (thus far, at least).
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As of September 2023, the reported median home price in the US was $412,000.00. In the state with the least expensive housing, that number was $229,000,00. This is according to Forbes.
But to be conservative, let's say you're a prospective homeowner in his/her early to mid 30s who buys a $200,000.00 house on a 30-year mortgage. If you were to sign a contract two days ago, on December 21, 2023, you would be paying roughly 6.67 percent interest. Had you been unlucky enough to sign the contract in September, October, or November of this year, that number would be in excess of 7 percent.
For context, when Biden first took office that was a meager 2.77 percent, and the absolute highest it ever got under Trump was 4.94 percent. But anyway, 6.67 percent. The cheapest it's been in the last 6 months, so you buy.
What does 6.67 percent interest mean? It means that, just to keep the debt from growing, you'll need to have $13,340 that you can afford to part with, per year. Once you've coughed this much up, as opposed to spending it on, I don't know, healthcare for your children and other things that are definitely not important, the bank will expect you to make an additional payment. You know, to actually repay the mortgage itself. Which would be around $6,660 a year.
In other words, unless you're in a financial situation where you can part with $20,000 every single year, it is impossible to afford what's generally considered an affordable home in this economy.
Now, you might say, "Well they wouldn't be paying rent so it's fine". Let's examine a few more statistics for some added context. As of October the median American's savings account balance was $1,200.
In August the average national rent price was $1,372, or $16,464 a year.
Of course, this average includes more expensive states, where a decent and sizable home wouldn't sell for $200K. Your average Alabaman isn't paying that much rent anyway. But even if we were to assume that your average Alabaman renter is, and we add that $1,200 of extra cash they have lying around, they would fall $2,340 short. They haven't a dime left to spend without seriously tightening their belt elsewhere; if they can't muster this, then homeownership will remain of their reach.
I'll reiterate: at 4.94 percent interest, what you'd have to pay yearly is $16,546 or so. This is a roughly $3,500 dollar difference, and that's the worst it ever was under Trump. The worst. Whereas under Biden, the current rate is at a 6-month low.
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@TheUnderdog
Dude. Quora is the most toxic environment you can be a part of. Don't walk; run away. Deactivate your account for your own sanity.
Take it from me: if you see content that infuriates you, and you respond to it, Quora will feed you more of the same. You're not "defeating" whoever it is you're responding to. You're just telling Quora to send more of his buddies your way. And yes, anyone who you respond to can block you at a whim.
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@TheUnderdog
Why would the right be against a company being deplatformed? That's capitalism; that's the free market.
Every important person in an industry, much less dozens of industries, colluding to promote the same ideology, purely for ideological reasons, and deny access to basic services to those who run contrary to such, isn't a natural product of free markets. In a free market, rational people would elevate their money-making instinct above their "I don't like this person so I refuse to serve them" instinct. Rather, it's exclusively the result of the mean-spiritedness of hundreds of thousands of powerful individuals.
And yes, I'll admit free markets aren't enough to solve this. Everyone has an issue that they break with their camp on, and this is mine.
That's because of the first amendment (which is good and even waving a Nazi flag or burning an American flag should be classified as free speech).
Yes, here I was referring to government censorship, not private sector censorship. Government censorship is very real outside the United States.
But since the bulk of human speech has migrated onboard platforms like Facebook Twitter, Reddit, etc., to the unnatural exclusion from said discourse of anyone who lacks access to these platforms, these companies deserve to be considered as powerful as governments in this regard and regulated as though they were governments.
So you admit black people have had their rights violated and therefore want to end police brutality? Alright.
Sure. If it can be proven in court that a black man (or a person of any race) was brutalized by cops and that he didn't create circumstances which justified their conduct, then let the appropriate remedies be taken.
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@TheUnderdog
If your definition of a RINO is an anti Trump republican, would you call Ben Shapiro a RINO? He doesn't like Trump.
A RINO is an ultra-center rightist who holds normal right-wingers in disdain. He craves the respectability afforded liberals through their control of the media and academia, and for a while they might even give it to him, so long as he sells out his own party in exchange. But in the long-run he's helping them shift the Overton Window left, and eventually he himself will be dubbed a radical whose politics are outside the mainstream.
If the Daily Wire and Prager U and Charlie Kirk were being censored by Big Tech, you would have no idea those people even exist.
Prager U is pretty tame though, and delineates more or less the outer limits of how right-wing you can go before being deplatformed or demonetized on YouTube. Several years ago, I would sometimes have alt-right or alt-lite videos (e.g. Sargon of Akkad) recommended to me on YouTube. Today it's all BreadTube (including a few communists) or occasionally Matt Walsh, suggesting the far-right has since been purged from there. And I suspect that whatever small far-right presence does still exist on YouTube is volunteer-based and they can't make a living doing it.
Additionally, see Parler, which overall was to the left of Gab but nonetheless was temporarily purged from the internet after January 6, because big tech stopped hosting the website and they had to find a new business partner.
Stop playing the victim (just like many hardcore BLM supporters)!
Dude.
People have been denied banking services needed to live in the 21st century, for no reason other than their speech. The Canadian government hacked and seized the crypto assets of the trucker protesters a year or two ago. The US is the only Western country where you don't have to fear being literally arrested and prosecuted for expressing an opinion as basic as "marriage is between a man and a woman", much less a more hardcore right-wing sentiment.
My life, as it stands right now, is easy compared to what some have been through. Nonetheless, "this violation of my rights is okay because other people have been violated even worse" is how you get fascism. So yes, whatever minute degree of repression the system subjects me to, I will find it intolerable now and in the future.
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@Best.Korea
For once, I agree with you.
Metaphorically speaking, the same "demon of censorship" came to possess every sizable tech company all at once in the second half of the 2010s. They'll bring that same toxic anti-free speech environment here if they can get their hands on this website.
Here. A literal debate platform. What would remain is a sad echo chamber between leftists of all stripes and a tiny handful of ultra-vanilla RINOs who, despite themselves, would still find themselves walking on eggshells at times to avoid a ban. In turn, the website itself would die because it'd become so insufferably boring overnight. And in turn, the buyer would compensate for this by defrauding advertisers with a torrent of spam accounts and spam content like what happened on DDO.
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Also, it's not exactly a damning indictment of Trump that one of the most stereotypically liberal states in the Union, with a Democrat governor (its last Republican one left office back in 2007) and a Democrat supermajority in both legislative houses, would decide to do this. In fact, the Colorado ruling was 4-3, which is much narrower than you would expect coming from a place like that.
If even our own resident commieland was somewhat reluctant to attempt such an outrageous move as this, then it tells you the effort to disqualify Trump from the ballot is nothing more than hyperpartisan politics as usual.
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I see a potential good in this.
Colorado hasn't voted Republican in about 20 years, and the national popular vote count isn't what decides the president, so it's hard to see the real loss from this one blue state doing so.
On the other hand, there's still 11 months or so for this case to reach the docket of the Supreme Court. If they order Colorado to admit Trump to the ballot, and Colorado refuses, it's possible they might throw out Colorado's electoral votes as punishment. Given that Colorado has 10 votes, it could swing a razor-thin race for Trump. And if the same thing happens in some other blue states, it could be enough to assure Trump a second term.
But I guess we'll have to see.
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@Best.Korea
Just curious, do you know what is inflation?
Yes. It is a decrease in the buying power of a given amount of money, especially that which results from government monetary policy (e.g. printing more money).
Key word: governmental. Capitalism is not responsible for this.
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@Best.Korea
This can be disproven with one chart.
Fuel is the singular example which is the least favorable to me, since it's a depletable resource so you would only expect prices to rise over time. Even so, gas prices from 2015-2021 were consistently below $3.30, which, adjusting for inflation, was lower than throughout the periods 1932-1945 and 1979-1983.
If free market capitalism has enabled inflation-adjusted prices to remain stable over the very long term for a resource whose overall supply cannot grow at all, then what does this say about commodities for which factory production can simply be ramped up in the event of shortages?
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@Best.Korea
People "stick their nose in gender" because it's important. Maybe a little less so today than it used to be, but historically the conservatives were often the only thing preventing civilizational collapse.
A poll that came out not that long ago suggests around 20% of Gen Z identifies as some category under the LGBTQ umbrella. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or just "queer". Some because it's immediately pleasurable and hedonistic, others never learning how to deal with the opposite sex and hoping they'll find greener pastures shacking up with their own, and others being more straight than gay but choosing to emphasize the little bit of gayness they have because LGBTQ identity is cool now.
I needn't have to explain what this entails. Men being in relationships with men, women being in relationships with women. Men trying to present like women and being a turnoff to most cis women. Women trying to present like men and being a turnoff to most cis men. People doubling down on the queer aesthetic and not being conventionally attractive to most people who might otherwise consider dating them. Not just because of their outward appearance, which is definitely half of it, but also because probably most LGBTQ people have crippling mental issues (and will readily admit as much online in many cases).
When all is said and done, you have a group that's notoriously averse to settling down in pair bonds for life and having families. I'm sure a handful of them do, but overall statistics don't paint a picture of demographic stability.
In the 21st century, fine. Whatever. You can replace people with immigrants. Which causes its own long-term problems if those immigrants aren't assimilated into the culture which existed before, but whatever. It can be done.
But what about the Middle Ages, when a woman might have 8 children and only have 2 survive to adulthood? When the population might increase 10 percent after 100 years? In short, a population just barely above replacement rate WITHOUT the queer lifestyle being rampant? What happens when you introduce this, and suddenly the numbers start dipping below the threshold, and stay there permanently? Eventually, something would have to give. That country would have to die out sooner or later.
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@Sam_Flynn
Actually, he's not wrong per se. There are people in the world, possibly millions throughout history, who went their entire lives believing they were women but had XY chromosomes. There are various intersex conditions to this effect and sometimes the only visible symptom was/is infertility.
The conventional modern understanding has an object as being reducible to its parts. Even conservative efforts to define gender by DNA or phenotype are a byproduct of modernity.
But in the past, Western philosophy, namely Scholasticism, saw objects possessing what is called "essence", which simplistically can be defined as the answer to the question "what is the thing". For example, a horse is a horse. A tree is a tree. A human is a human, a man is a man, and a woman is a woman.
Essence is a metaphysical property and you cannot break essence down to a DNA test, metallurgical analysis, x-ray, or so on. It's immeasurable as such concepts as, for example, the soul.
In the case of gender, when liberals say it can't be given an absolute rational definition that applies to all human cases, they are right. Of course, that doesn't make gender less real nor abrogate the consequences of throwing said reality out the window.
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