Swagnarok

They're small, but they can be hitched to a truck and moved anywhere. The owner of the trailer doesn't have to own the land that the trailer's on. Instead, he/she can just opt to pay rent. The price of the mobile home itself would be about 1/4th the same price of a conventional (and, to be fair, considerably larger) home. According to one source, a mobile home manufactured c. 2014 would have an average lifespan of about 30-55 years, and I will not discount the possibility of construction design improvements in coming decades increasing this figure somewhat. In any case, a person who bought their moved out and bought a mobile home of their own at 18 would find that he'd likely only have to purchase and move into a new house once more in the span of his life, barring damage incurred from close proximity to natural disasters and whatnot.

It would serve to make housing significantly more affordable in America if mobile homes became more popular, and, perhaps equally importantly, it'd allow for greater flexibility in the jobs market: in today's climate, many Americans are reluctant to move into a new house because they're not sure they'll be able to sell the old one, which would straddle them with extreme debt. So they may turn down more lucrative job opportunities elsewhere in the state/country. If all you needed was a moving truck and a new trailer park somewhere, I suspect we'd have a much more dynamic economy.

A big barrier to this is the sordid reputation associated with trailer parks: they're thought of as low-income housing units, where you'd be surrounded by distasteful and even dangerous neighbors. If the image of trailer parks could be rehabilitated so that it was a socially acceptable option for the middle class, that'd solve the problem I think. Also, the government could work with manufacturers of homes to design a model of more "serious" mobile homes which are better insulated, ventilated, and energy-efficient.

Thoughts?

A lot of men in my generation (and perhaps myself as well) are stuck in a rut where they don't really know what to do with their lives and they end up just doing nothing. They indulge in pleasures like video games (along with near-constantly sitting down) and eating junk food. They get fat, fail to develop vital social skills, and ultimately fail find a wife. This is a big problem that has to be resolved. Military service is really something that could correct this problem, but we have far more young people than the number of soldiers that we need. So something else would have to be found to take its place.

As I've said before (not here necessarily but perhaps on DDO), IQ doesn't matter as much as environment. We can cultivate an environment where people are able to put their full potential to use. Being intellectually stimulated as a child (or lack thereof) will do a lot to determine how well you manage later in life.

That is to say, I think even those people who are like "Nah kids sound like a lot of trouble I love being a bachelor" will eventually reach a point where they'd like to have kids. It's part of who we are, and modern hedonism can't take that away from us entirely.

Not necessarily. You just have to make having a family affordable, and to make it easier to find a spouse. That's the big kicker. Even I of all people would like to have kids one day.

The white birth rate could be increased via implementing paid maternity leave, abolishing social security (for white people under the age of 30 at the time of implementation with the understanding that their only security rested in either saving up a butt ton of money or having children to support them in their old age), and incentivizing people of color to undergo sterilizations or to otherwise not have children. These birth control measures would not include abortion, as that is murder in my opinion and thus should not be legal.

Hard paleoconservatism as opposed to neoconservatism, which in many respects is too liberal and which wrongly worships laissez-faire capitalism as the highest good for a nation.

Race is a very powerful idea: it causes you to perceive certain people as "your people" to the exclusion of everybody else. It causes you to perceive those on the outside as a potential threat and perhaps eternal enemy. The idea has in modern times especially captured the imaginations of people of color, who all perceive themselves as being threatened by and victims of the white majority. People hate what they fear and resent, usually. So that means "white" Americans (those of European, non-Hispanic, non-Jewish, non-Roma descent) are regularly scapegoated for all the problems faced by these groups, and will accordingly be punished if they lose the majority needed to stave these people off.

White Americans post-Civil Rights Era largely stopped thinking about race. This was kind of coarse in that it caused them to fail to acknowledge the inequalities and injustices faced by, say, Black Americans, but on the flip side it meant that they regarded their identity as Americans as being more important than their identities as Whites. Before this, in the age of White Supremacy, they were generally powerful enough a majority that they could afford to make race less of a concern than, say, foreign policy and the economy. Hence, these white people who made up the majority have always been Americans first. 

But what will happen if that majority is lost? What if People of Color become the majority? Well, they're still fixated on their status as victims and marginalized peoples, so that identity naturally comes first to them, their identities as Americans coming second. They will always flock to vote in monolithic blocs for whatever party panders to their demographic, and post-1968 that's been the Democratic Party. So once they become the majority, the end result will be a one-party state for the rest of time, like we've seen in Mexico. As these groups are much poorer than their white counterparts on average, they're always going to vote for the left-wing populists who promise to redistribute the wealth. Latin Americans are especially vulnerable to the siren's call of demagogues, as history has shown. Rule of law will be eroded, a cycle of dictatorships will take the place of our 200+ year old democracy. The economy will stagnate and decline.

For the above reason, I regard it as imperative that a comfortable white majority (say, 70%) be sustained in these lands, at least until the present mentality of non-whites (of course I'm speaking in generalizations, not on the level of every non-white individual living in the US) can be broken. Once this majority is ensured, I would support greater measures to combat racial inequality, though NOT the welfare state as we have it now, as this only perpetuates poverty in the long term.

In the America that I'd like to see, our economy would consist of untold millions of highly skilled workers, able to compete in the international market, and against the machines, ready to export our goods to a world ready to consume those goods. These skilled workers would get together to form business syndicates and share the responsibilities, workload, and profits of their enterprises. The vast majority of hardworking Americans could afford to own their home, get married, have kids. We would not be a wasteful people but all the byproducts of industry and consumption would be readily recycled. We would primarily rely upon renewable energies, especially nuclear, solar, and ethanol.

Most Americans would be religious, that religion being Christianity (and especially Protestant Christianity). Most children would be raised in a somewhat religious home, and would stay away from vices like drugs and promiscuity, but at the same time most people would not really start taking religion seriously until, say, their 20s or 30s. They'd enjoy happy childhoods, playing outside and hanging out with friends; most parents would limit the use of electronics in their households and especially for younger children. Most kids would attend public schools, as a way of ensuring social cohesion. English would be the undisputed national language, and all second-generation immigrants would end up becoming fluent in it. Most people would trust in the government, and for good reason, and they would be able to trust that when they turned on the news they wouldn't be fed a bunch of propaganda. We would be a democracy in which voter turnout was high in most elections, and especially in presidential elections. There would be two parties, one center-left and one center-right, to ensure a balance.

Instead of asking how one would draw the line, I think a more fitting question is how to know when a line is being crossed. Is it when *only* religious people hold a certain standpoint? In these instances, is it possible that nonreligious people are influenced by an anti-religious bias (not saying at all this is the case with abortion) or by something similar? Is separation of church and state a one-sided thing, something that only religious people can violate?

Hard Paleoconservatism, including racial elements. Change my mind.

Sure. In mid-19th century America you had religious leaders, especially in the northern part of the country, who denounced slavery, and I'm sure they played no insignificant role in convincing their congregations to be opposed to the practice. Because of course, religious leaders have traditionally been on the front lines of speaking up on moral issues. But slavery was also something that you didn't have to be religious to oppose. Abortion's the same way.

It should be noted also that the bulk of China's economy is centered around manufacturing stuff. If the US were to convince the rest of the world (in response to an unprovoked Chinese invasion of Taiwan) to simply satisfy their manufacturing needs elsewhere, the Chinese economy would collapse overnight. So there's more than one way to skin a cat in regards to Taiwan.

If the Chinese economy were to collapse, and their military to lose a war against Taiwan and the US, that'd most certainly spell the collapse of the communist regime, or at the very least Xi Jinping would be ousted and replaced by more sane communist leadership (though I'm skeptical that the regime could survive this).

The People's Liberation Army would have its work cut out for it in trying to take the island of Taiwan. The geography definitely favors the defenders, who have a reasonably advanced and modern military, supported by a modern and fairly large economy. The Chinese would not be able to use any of their artillery in the battle, since the distance of the Taiwan Strait at its narrowest point is 81 miles. Instead they'd have to rely upon missiles, which are quite expensive per shot, unless the Chinese were desperate enough to resort to nukes, in which case of course the Taiwanese would lose in a moment's notice.

And at this time the US military is still stronger than that of the Chinese. The PLA has not fought a war in decades, whereas the US invaded Iraq in 2003. So there could be major flaws in the coordination, tactics, organization, etc. of the PLA that are not apparent to us now. The military forces of dictatorships are generally at a disadvantage in that its generals and officers tend to distrust each other and communicate with each other less effectively, in that the motivation to fight among the soldiers would likely be lower than that of the defending Taiwanese or even the Americans (though maybe not in this case since this would be about "reuniting" China), and in that innovation and outside of the box thinking are usually discouraged. That's a big part of why the Arab dictatorships/kingdoms consistently lost to Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, despite Israel being much smaller. The US has most mastered combined arms doctrine (a force multiplier in any war), whereas the Chinese have not yet done so.

The Chinese would deliver a major blow to the US if they were to engage in kinetic anti-satellite warfare. However, doing so would render the entirety of Outer Orbit unsuitable for space travel and satellites, the latter of which the whole world relies upon for various purposes (such as GPS, weather forecasting, etc), for years, decades, or even centuries to come, and I'm skeptical that they'd do something so extreme just to conquer Taiwan.

Mostly anime.

If we go to war with them in 2020 over Taiwan, and we end up winning, and the communist regime collapses, then it'll finally be safe for the US government to adopt a very insular focus. Putin and Erdogan aren't long-term threats to us.

That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing in a world where the CPC wasn't in charge of the country. A large Chinese consumer base would make for a lucrative market for US exports, and maybe a liberal and democratic China could handle the global peacekeeping work that we're stuck with right now.

That having been said, it seems increasingly likely that China's gonna end up stuck in the "middle income trap". A communist regime will only allow economic reforms to a certain point, and Xi Jinping's one-man rule is making even these less certain.

Keeping abortion illegal poses no challenge to the separation of church and state whatsoever, no more than regular laws outlawing the killing of other people do.

If the 350,000 figure is indeed accurate (though it also sounds extremely sketchy, as Argentina has less than 45 million people, and yet that figure is more than 1/3rd of the number of abortions performed in the US, a country with over 7x the population of Argentina, which would suggest either that Argentina has a very big "abortion culture" or that left-wing hacks are dramatically inflating the number of abortions performed clandestinely to paint the abortion ban in as negative a light as possible), then the government clearly isn't doing its job. It should work to make contraceptives much more readily available and crack down much more harshly on all parties involved in the act of abortion, including the prospective mother.

I'm assuming that Earth is 1harderthanyouthink and vagabond is FaustianJustice. Am I wrong?

It could be. But if 70% of the people here are from DDO's religion forum, that's gonna be a major buzzkill.

As a person who grew up exposed more to the Prequel rather than Original Trilogy, I would disagree with that (I would just like to add also that Jar Jar Binks was not nearly enough to ruin an entire three movies).

Yeah, kind of. This is what I've written so far from a poem I'm probably gonna use in a fanfic at some point later (just as a caveat, my poetry never rhymes):

Trapped in the storm of my mind none can hear me scream

I know our bodies shall be threshed at the foot of the altar

And our ashes sprinkled on the lips of the grinning demon

This happy dream is naught but the vapors of a dying flame

I want to cherish these moments always, but I am reminded

The strongest among us must yield to the turning of the hour

Its ticking, like nails on a chalkboard, like cascading thunder

The stroke of midnight shall do us apart, forever and ever.

Also, if you could let us access our own profile pages instead of just editing them...

One feature I would strongly recommend adding is Profile Comments.