Total posts: 2,178
-->
@TheMorningsStar
I mean, yes. Have you watched those clips? Bugs always acts in a way that accentuates the sexual aspects of the female form when he is in drag (rather than just using female clothing as a disguise). The cartoony and comedic nature of the show helps to mitigate things, but that doesn't make drag less of a sexual thing.
The “what about *insert super innocuous but sort of similar thing here*” gotcha is a low tier gotcha but it does sometimes work because conservatives are generally either not introspective enough or are too cowardly and browbeaten to admit that they actually dislike some things. While bringing your kids to a drag show is really really weird I honestly don’t think it’s that inherently/objectively damaging. The reason I wouldn’t want my kids exposed to a drag show at a young age is because that’s not a way I want them to behave. I don’t want them associating adult behavior with things like cross dressing. I would absolutely hate it if my son did drag. That would obviously be leagues better than him going on drugs, cutting his penis off, etc to be a crude and offensive imitation of a woman but it’s still not an outcome I want. Where bugs bunny is an obvious joke, seeing an adult behave in a way and seeing your parents approve of and celebrate that behavior is very different.
Most right wing people probably wouldn’t be willing to admit that anymore but that’s where the impulse comes from. The truth is that they don’t want people like that around their kids, period. Conservative behavior towards their children can basically be modeled as “does x increase the chances of grandchildren outside of a teen pregnancy?” If yes x is good. If no x is bad. It’s a healthy, normal outlook. Progressives happily will, and do, behave in ways that sacrifice their potential future grandchildren to appear tolerant.
Created:
Posted in:
This is a terrible rebuke. Do you know why it felt like being beggars? Because that’s exactly what they were. We developed and produced the vaccine. This was something South Africa was not capable of doing itself. Nor was South Africa even capable of paying for the vaccines. The United States using tax payer dollars GAVE millions of doses to them and the rest of the world. And this guy has the audacity to complain? Maybe his country shouldn’t have spent the last thirty years driving off its most productive people.
Created:
Posted in:
Banning porn would be almost impossible and probably not legal in the United States but it absolutely needs to be restricted so that children have a harder time accessing it. Kids get exposed to pornography at like age 12 now and it does impact their sexuality in a negative way. Porn addiction is very real and nobody is less equipped to deal with it than a kid just going through puberty.
To the people saying “you can’t ban porn!” it’s true that you wouldn’t be able to totally extinguish it, but consider the case of child porn. Sure someone who really really wants it will be able to get it (at risk to themselves) but nobody is going to just stumble upon it. It would be easy to make age verification a requirement to access websites where porn is hosted. Most people aren’t going to risk the hammer of the federal government coming down on them so that children can watch their porn site
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@ponikshiy
He’s never been that smart although in his youth he was definitely of above average intelligence. He does (or did) seem to have an animalistic “low cunning” type of intelligence where he was good at feeling out peoples weaknesses and catching people off guard. You can see this in the 2016 primary debates where he tore through his republican opponents who were caught completely off guard by his demeanor and attacks. He had a strong bullies instinct for how to hit people where it really hurt, and like a stereotypical bully wasn’t very good when he got hit back. He also got overconfident being able to bulldoze everyone throughout his life up until his presidency. He likely thought that the power of the presidency would make his ability to brute force whatever outcomes he wanted out of people stronger but the opposite was true. The people and forces who are at a level where they interact with the President are insanely powerful. Way more than he was able to handle. In the end he got taken for a ride most of the time.
Now he’s more or less gone senile, he has his moments still but he’s fixated on litigating the 2020 election over and over again despite it being overwhelmingly obvious that voters don’t want to hear it. Even in 2016 he easily fell into obvious rhetorical traps in the general election debates and as President he damaged himself constantly
Created:
-->
@TheMorningsStar
I find attempts at separating sex and gender typically end up with sexist stereotyping of the kind that the feminists of the mid-late 20th century marched against.
I have an extended family member who around age 13 or so didn’t want to wear girl clothes and for a time decided she was “non-binary.” Fortunately she reverted before falling into the medicalization trap but you’re exactly right. You can be a female who wears pants lol. It’s terrifying to think that the wrong guidance counselor or psychiatrist or less aware parents could’ve set her down a path that led to sterilization and mutilation…because she didn’t want to wear dresses and fuss about her hair.
It’s completely fine to be a girl and wear pants or have short hair. You’re right that the entire thing relies on super strict and old fashioned gender roles and says that if you don’t fit into that then there’s something YOU need to change. It also has some really weird metaphysical element too, if you talk to these advocates it’s clear that their belief is in a non-material, pre-existing soul that can be male or female in character and can by some cosmic mistake end up in the wrong body. But they’ll never actually defend or articulate the theology here, it’s all implicit
As a barely related aside this is why a decent number (but not majority) of poor people vote Republican. Even though Democrats will give you more free stuff, them being in charge means you have to accept whatever bizarre social policy they are currently fixated on. You have to do what they want. Literally whatever they say! Which changes so quickly you won’t even know four years in advance what’s going to be forced on you!
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@PREZ-HILTON
Thett- I talked to them and they are permanently gone after the refusal to ban TWS and Roosevelt
This isn’t true lol. Nobody talked to me. I don’t get a whole lot of enjoyment out of this site and don’t have too much free time anymore so I don’t post that often but I probably won’t leave for the foreseeable future because there’s no reason to. It’s almost no investment to skim for interesting topics occasionally and make a post every few weeks
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Kaitlyn
I would definitely be executing at least several thousand a year people if I became dictator overnight, at least for a while. In the US especially in the more liberal states it’s common for murderers to be people who committed violent crime after violent crime and went to jail like two dozen times before they finally killed an innocent person.
Have you read A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark? I think it’s mentioned in that video you linked but I could be wrong. But he analyzed surname data and wills in England over a 1000 year period and concluded that there was huge downward mobility from the middle classes into farm laborers because the economy was so static, while the original peasants mostly just died off. This caused traits like forward thinking, conscientious etc to be highly selected for….were rapidly undoing that almost everywhere now of course.
Also every Western European country except France had huge emigration to the Americas or Australia which probably selected for less passive people too. The world wars may have been a selection event too
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Theweakeredge
Businesses harm the poor, harming businesses is necessary to help poor people.
Nothing could be further from the truth. How does harming business help the poor in any way?
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Theweakeredge
Simple, on our base level Leftists are people who want equality-we want to do so in a way where people don't get hurt- we want to do so in a way that betters society. And yet, soooo many of us advocate prison. Now; there are certainly situations where there is no other outcome, particularly when the individual is violent and is unable to be soothed. But that archetype makes up such a low percentage of such situations that its sad people would pretend otherwise.
People support prison because there really aren’t that many options for what to do with violent criminals. You can kill them which isn’t ideal in most circumstances. You can subject them to brutal corporal punishment but people who don’t have the stomach to support imprisonment aren’t going to support that. You could levy fines but someone who isn’t deterred by the possibility of a prison sentence decades long is unlikely to be deterred by something like that.
If you look at the demographics of who commits serious violent crimes (it’s overwhelmingly males between the ages of 15 and 35) keeping a violent person locked up during their most violent years isn’t exactly a bad idea. What solution are you offering exactly?
Created:
Posted in:
I’ve found it interesting that the belief in the transgenderism ideology implicitly means belief in a non-material soul. I’ve seen advocates say stuff like people shouldn’t have to go through puberty “without their consent” or that people were born in the “wrong body.” But from a secular, materialistic worldview you ARE your body full stop. It doesn’t make any sense to talk about “consenting” to biological processes, I don’t consent to getting thirsty but it happens anyway. There’s no way to be born into the wrong body, my specific DNA sequence could only have come from my mother and my father and could only have resulted in me. There is no mind-body distinction.
When you combine this with leftists unwavering belief in the blank slate (something that’s been objectively discredited for well over a century now) leftist theology teaches a totally extreme idea of free will that basically no one else has ever believed in. Someone needs to write a catechism
Created:
-->
@n8nrgim
It really depends on the industry a person is in. People constantly sneer at people in rural areas for “voting against their self interest” but what’s the economy based on in rural areas? Agriculture, resource extraction, oil/gas, or manufacturing. These are all industries that democrats are more or less hostile to due to pollution and whose viability they damage with regulations.
If you’re a lawyer or most other types of urban upper middle class professionals (but not the defense industry), democrats. They’re more likely to pass more bloat you’re able to leach off of and they’ll want to bring in immigrants who are willing to cheaply clean your house or watch your kids while you’re at work
If you’re a service worker in an urban or suburban area you’d want democrats nationally because they’re more likely to get you some mandated benefits and pay, but republicans on a state level. This is because blue state governments are more susceptible to NIMBYism (aka not building any housing) due to their concern about the environment and not worshipping the “free market”. This eventually causes everything in the state to be absurdly expensive and hampers economic growth which makes the position of the working class worse
if you’re on welfare democrats
If you’re a small business owner, usually republicans
If you work for any industry that’s perceived as either icky to progressives (like defense, something to do with slaughtering animals, anything associated with religion in any way) or pollutant/ugly (like oil and gas, airlines, mining, fishing, logging, manufacturing) you’d want republicans unless you’re on the absolute bottom of the food chain in those companies and often even then
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Best.Korea
I used to think that because of this reunification would happen on North Koreas terms but I don’t think they’d even want to reunify with the mess that’s likely coming South Koreas way. It’s hard to put into words how incredibly bad 4x as many retirees as new workers is
Created:
Posted in:
I've written before on South Korea but it's endlessly fascinating to watch a society that's in a death spiral get worse each year. South Korea had 6% fewer births in Q1 2023 than in Q1 2022...which itself was a record low year of births. In fact, every year since 2016 has had record low births after decades of steady decline. Their estimated Total Fertility Rate for the year is 0.74.
As a result, their population pyramid looked like this in 2021 and it's only gotten worse. Note how there are over 4x as many people in their 50s, who will be leaving the workforce in the next few decades, than there are infants to replace them. 0.74 is unfathomably bad. If that didn't change, the population structure would look like this:
Generation 1: 100
Generation 2: 37
Generation 3: 14
I just don't know what's going to happen to the young people who remain. Many are assuming they'll just be tax cows/slaves to the elderly majority, but I'm not so sure. Like all government, at the end of the day the mandates of a democratic government come at the point of a sword. If you try to make serfs out of the only people in your society who are still capable of violence I don't think it'll work out too well for you.
It's very sad to see this happen to a people as accomplished and capable as South Koreans, but hopefully what happens to them serves as a lesson to other peoples. I've read interviews with young South Koreans and it seems like they almost universally think of their childhood as something they don't want repeated, and I can't say I blame them. Going to a hypercompetitive school all day, then going to some cram school afterwards for five hours every day, never seeing your dad who work in his office helljob until 11 PM every night...I wouldn't want to live that way either, or bring another soul into this world for that sort of life. On top of this all of the prestigious jobs are in a single metro area which I've been led to understand is almost as expensive as southern California when compared to incomes.
But at the end of the day it's an entire country and the survivors will inherit it. What will be left I have no idea. What I do know is that if you're fortunate enough to live in the US or Western Europe there's basically infinite upside to having kids as the world is about to get way more weird and open. Your countries getting flooded with immigrants isn't ideal, but I would take being born in the USA or even somewhere like the UK in 2023 100 times out of 100 over South Korea. If you dislike the system it will be increasingly easy to just opt out. Perhaps our children 25 years from now can make a living doing odd jobs a few months a year for the masses of aging and college educated South Korean cog people living in high rises and spend the rest of their time four wheeling in the abandoned countryside exploring ruins and chilling with their personalized AI assistant.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Vegasgiants
4) jack up taxes for everyone to pay to put everyone in jail
Lmao I missed this one somehow. If you think that we should permit ordinary working people to be harassed, intimidated, and victimized when they’re just trying to go about there day there isn’t a point in continuing this conversation
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Vegasgiants
Laws against libel and slander are not violations of freedom of speech and never have been. Are you opposed to libel and slander being torts?
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Vegasgiants
1) That people stop spreading malicious and false narratives about white people that demonize us, and are socially shamed when they do.
2) That libel laws are reformed. People with large platforms let alone national news platforms should not be free to spread malicious and unfounded slander against private citizens.
3) That labor laws are reformed to protect workers from arbitrary firings like this. Your boss shouldn’t be allowed to regulate your behavior off the job.
4) That crime and disorder generally is more harshly punished. What likely happened here is that these teenagers were running a common scam which involves a group of males claiming that the victim is stealing the rented bike they paid for. By using physical intimidation they extort money from the victims to make them go away
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Greyparrot
Cool cool, now do "adjust for inflation"
My real wages peaked in summer of 2020 lol. Even though my nominal pay is $10,000 more now thanks to a promotion. I am just barely keeping my head above water
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@YouFound_Lxam
Trump would be an extremely bad and damaged nominee who will probably lose. I really really hope that he doesn’t win the nomination again but it looks like he will. And yes, if he does it will be with the help of democrats propping him up
But I want to push back on the idea that Trump can’t win. Because of his….unique situation (totally blowing all good will by refusing to admit he lost, starting a riot, not wanting to talk about anything other than the election he lost…) people really underrate how bad and divisive Biden’s presidency has been. The inflation situation alone would have totally doomed any party if the alternative offered was at all palatable to the voters. The border situation is incredibly bad, probably the second worst non economic political thing to happen in my lifetime after Bush’s wars. While it doesn’t rank as high as economics voters do care about the basic functions of a state (like having a border) working properly. Trump is surprisingly competitive in the early polls:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2024/president/us/general-election-trump-vs-biden-7383.html
Yeah yeah maybe they don’t mean a whole lot right now…but they don’t mean nothing either. Both of these men are well known quantities at this point. He absolutely can win. It seems like everyone other than diehard Maga people have already written him off in the general election but that isn’t a good read of the data at this point
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@oromagi
There's no scenario where Republicans don't take 100% of the blame for deliberately trashing good faith and credit.
This is your bias/bubble talking. The median voter has no idea what’s going on. If a default did happen the median response in polls would probably be “both sides are to blame” but at the end of the day the President is always the one who gets the credit/blame for economic circumstances whether that’s fair or not.
Republicans won the house, that means anything the president wants passed needs to at least be bipartisan. Wishing that wasn’t the case isn’t going to make reality go away. Both sides need to negotiate which they are doing because they aren’t stupid
Created:
Posted in:
In some recent threads on this forum people have asked in response to info about crime rates by race “why does it matter” or “what do you want people to do with this?”
I’ll give an example that I think demonstrates why this info needs to be pressed into people’s minds again and again and again. The other day in New York City, a pregnant white woman was just off a twelve hour shift was harassed by a group of young black men who tried to steal a bike she had rented to get home. They claimed that THEY actually were the one who rented the bike and she was trying to steal from them. They threatened her, touched her stomach, insulted her baby, and posted the whole thing online. She was the one who got doxxed, received countless death threats, had her name and face plastered across the world from several news outlets including NBC, and was put on leave from her job. Turns out she had the receipts! They were the ones trying to steal from her, as anyone with half a brain would’ve automatically known.
People’s mental heuristics are so off due to decades anti white propaganda and decades of this sort of information being suppressed that the majority see a video like that and think “yep, definitely likely that a pregnant white woman who just got off a twelve hour shift would pick a fight with multiple black men.” Those of us who understand reality immediately knew the story as presented was bullshit. How often do white women commit crimes against black men? How often do pregnant women commit crimes? How about white NYC healthcare workers, are they a particularly criminal population? The number of crimes committed by pregnant white women against black men probably number less than ten a year.
This isn’t an isolated incident either. In fact most of these “Karen” videos are debunked upon further investigation but the damage is already done. The demand for white supremacist oppression outstrips the supply so greatly in America that an out of context video where you don’t show the appropriate deference to our societies socially privileged groups can end in the destruction of everything you’ve ever worked for.
The disgusting and extremely creepy narrative about “white women tears” being a threat to black men is actively harmful to women who are socially punished for standing up for themselves if the men harassing them are the wrong color. The reality of who is a threat to who is the exact opposite: due to vastly different rates of crime between men and women and interracial crime between whites and blacks there are large swaths of this country where white women are the ones who can not safely walk. As an aside, in almost all of those places the housing, food, medical care, and education for the citizens living there are all paid for by white peoples tax dollars.
This is why information about crime rates matters. Because it’s true and it helps people better navigate the world. Were it more widely known perhaps fewer innocent people would be punished for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@Greyparrot
Desantis is making a huge mistake by waiting so long to declare. Meanwhile Trump has been busy consolidating his position as the de facto nominee. It’s not over but it looks a lot worse for desantis than it did over the winter
Created:
-->
@hey-yo
Ah... What? The people to blame and are at fault for looking at you as piece of shit are the people who are looking at you as a piece of shit…To think that an entire group is guilty of x because a minority percentage perform x is a fallacy just as much as assuming one person is guilty of x if a group performed x. Fallacy either way and for a good reason. This type of reasoning does not bring us to thd truth.
I’m not saying that you or your brother or any other person deserves suspicious looks or ill treatment. What I’m saying is that the cause of that suspicion is because of crime statistics like this. When I talk about who’s to blame I don’t mean in a moral sense, I’m saying it as a reflection of reality. Right or wrong that’s just the way it is
Although to be clear I absolutely condemn criminals much more than anyone who hurts some feelings by being unable to know at a glance whose a criminal and who isn’t
Created:
Posted in:
My prediction about Trump being the nominee again seems more likely than ever although he’s surprisingly competitive in the polls with Biden for the general election. It’s hard to see him winning again but it’s beginning to look like he has a punchers chance…again
Has anything happened to change any of your predictions?
Created:
-->
@ILikePie5
The ball is the Dems’ court. House GOP passed a bill. The Senate and Biden haven’t lifted a finger
It was pretty funny that they thought they’d get away with just not negotiating. The opposition party won the House, you can’t just pretend that didn’t happen! You need them to vote up any bill you want to sign
Created:
-->
@hey-yo
Not really. My brother is well to do as a broker. Easily wealthy although not 1%. He gets dirty looks at his own apartment complex, has been asked if he was a pro basketball player, asked to show that he lives in his own apartment complex, and has said multiple times - he will be watched up and down the isles at a store.If you are suspected to commiting a crime just by your race, thats not privlidge.
That sucks but isn’t relevant to the point I was making at all, which is that wealth/poverty isnt the only explanation for the causes of crime. If he committed a violent crime despite being wealthy I would have absolutely zero sympathy towards him.
The fault for that kind of treatment lies with other people in his group who commit crimes at a disproportionate rate even when very wealthy. It is not the fault of people who are often much poorer and less educated than your brother for noticing patterns. If you’ve got a bone to pick, and you do because that situation would annoy me to no end if it were me, the cold hard truth is that it’s with the criminals within your group and not with the rest of society
Created:
-->
@Vegasgiants
Sowell is entitled to his opinion but it's all he hasIf black culture was the problem rich black kids would do more crimesThey don'tSorry
Actually they do. Raj Chetty examined anonymized census data for children born between 1978 and 1983 and examined their outcomes. Black men who grew up in the top 1% were as likely to be incarcerated as white men who grew up around the 30th percentile with a household income of $36,000.
The NYT attributes this to racism but that’s pretty ridiculous to me. Anyone growing up in the top 1% is in a place of extreme privilege regardless of race.
The few places this dynamic didn’t occur were places that had a large number of African immigrants. The dynamic also didn’t occur with black women who had similar outcomes as adults with white women who were raised in the same economic bracket. This suggests strongly that the problem is not racism or economics but a cultural issue with native born black men.
Created:
-->
@Savant
What is it you want people to do with this information?
I can’t speak for the OP but I would I’ve shared this type of info before and want two things:
1) I want people to really think about how this information conflicts with common narratives about race in America. Black people are told that they need to fear white people, especially when in a position of authority (“the talk”.) We’re constantly told about how bad white people are, things that happened 100 years ago are constantly dredged up while what’s happening in the here and now is ignored. In reality, they’ve killed roughly 100,000 more of us since the 1960s than we’ve killed of them despite the fact that we’ve outnumbered them at least 5 to 1 in that period. This info basically destroys the left wing, anti-white narrative because for the last half century black people have been victimizing white people, but we are told it’s the other way around
2) I want black leaders to be challenged to lead their communities towards a path where they stop hurting us.
Created:
Posted in:
This is likely the first of many. From the tiny amount of research I’ve done it’s probably an overreach but I don’t think it matters much. Republicans need a sanity check before deciding to nominate an 80 year old who’s already lost once and is under multiple indictments. 2016 Trump isn’t coming back
Created:
-->
@cristo71
That climate change needs to be acknowledged and addressed in earnest by the global community. After hearing that a global shutdown from COVID barely made a dent in climate change, it made me seriously question what would mitigate it? Now, it seems as though attempts at a “cure” are as bad or worse than the disease itself. Much of the green movement seems like mere virtue signaling or a sort of secular religion or a gateway towards socialism. We humans are much better at adaptation than prevention realistically.
It’s pretty clear that climate change is NOT going to be addressed. We’re under a democratic administration right now and they won’t even tackle low hanging fruit. We just had a multi year forced experiment that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that for most white collar workers the long commute that burns off so much fossil fuel and pollutes so much is NOT NECESSARY. But the government won’t try to push back against companies trying to end work from home. They won’t aggressively promote and fund nuclear power either.
They will, however, ban incandescent light bulbs. I would rather just skip pointless stuff like this
Created:
Some things I’ve changed my thinking on in recent years:
-Trump:
He sucks
-“The right always loses”
I used to believe this but it’s just not true. On the issues that GOP elites actually care about, like guns, abortion, tax cuts, or getting right wing judges, they fight like lions and they often win. The problem is that a lot of the stuff the GOP base cares about, GOP elites do not care about.
-Immigration
I used to be almost obsessively anti immigration. I’m still anti immigration but I view it with a sort of grim fatalism now. People the world over will support literally anything to keep service workers coming and to keep old age pensions solvent. US legal immigration levels are actually not that high relative to the population.
The big demographic change in the US happened because of illegal immigration/birthright citizenship and natives not having kids. The establishment line about “I don’t care as long as they come legally!!” and being “pro-family” was always reasonable, they just failed to actually do these things. Getting citizens to have more kids is of vital importance and not just because of culture or whatever else, we’ll even run out of immigrants in the next generation—at least the type we’ve come to rely on (someone willing to illegally immigrate to wash dishes 12 hours a day)
-AI:
It might change everything and make all these social issues basically irrelevant
-Religion:
I’ve gotten more and more religious as time goes on. That might change but me becoming steadily more religious has been happening for about a decade now
Created:
-->
@Tejretics
- I’ve become a decent bit more “tough-on-crime.” I always used to support efforts to hire police officers, but I now think there’s a reasonable case for higher sentences for violent crimes in countries with relatively low sentences (although with substantial investments aimed at making prison a less shitty place) and substantial investments in the police. That said, I still lean progressive on criminal justice issues (e.g., support significant police reform and banning police unions in most countries, support substantially shorter sentences or no sentences at all for nonviolent crimes).
I think part of what causes the tough on crime v soft on crime issue is that prison just isn’t a good punishment for a lot of crimes. It tends to make violent criminals worse since it basically destroys lives and allows them to “network” with other criminals. It just seems cruel for non violent criminals. I would take literally any flogging/beating that I would eventually recover from that allow me to go about my life afterward over a prison sentence of any length that would basically destroy my life.
On the other hand there absolutely are people who are so violent and so beyond redemption that they must be physically separated from the rest of society if you don’t want to kill them. I haven’t figured out yet exactly what the perfect solution is but it makes sense that peoples views would move back and forth based on which of these values seems more pressing at any given time, Justice and fairness when crime is low vs the need for order once crime starts going up because violent criminals are being released
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@whiteflame
I’m so sorry to hear this, whiteflame. I haven’t talked to Ajab in a long time and we weren’t very close when he was active but I do know that numerous people tried to help him over the years. It goes without saying but is still needs to be said that there’s nothing more you could’ve done. Rest in peace
Created:
Posted in:
I’d vote for her, but it’s pretty clear that the primary is a two man race so unless something changes she’ll be out early
Created:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
What did your parents do to stop that from happening? Did they protest? Did they go to DC to demand justice for west coast Japanese people. (It wasn’t all Asians as you implied)
most of the posters on this site don’t have parents who were adults, or even alive during WWII lol
Created:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
- When my father and in-laws die in the coming years I will inherit over a million dollars worth of real estate. Imagine the effect not being able to get a mortgage for a house has had on generations of black families.
If those homes were under restrictive covenants in the 1960s it wouldn’t be very difficult for you to track down the descendants of a black family who lived in the area and was in a position to afford to buy the house at the time and give them your portion of the inheritance. My family came from nothing so if I inherit wealth it will have come from savings from the 1990s-2020s, but if you actually have or are coming into wealth that dates from the 1960s or earlier and was denied to a black family you have every right to give your own reparations.
Created:
More for the record that responding specifically to the OP:
There’s actually some truth to this, but people are overestimating the degree of financial literacy, agency, and sheer luck required for the average family to still retain housing wealth from that far back. The vast majority don’t. A lot of (white) housing wealth was also destroyed in that same era due to the social disintegration and skyrocketing mostly black crime rates that accompanied the 1960s social changes. This is still a country where you can start with nothing and make it. These types of comparisons always leave out Asian people who, despite mostly being poor or young immigrants a generation ago, now have more median household wealth than white people. Hispanic people have a higher median wealth than black people even though most of them came here quite literally dirt poor, and are still coming. One of the most infuriating things about the modern left is denying anyone other than white people agency. Any given disparity can’t possibly be the result of individual choices.
But there’s definitely *some* impact for sure. Whites are more likely to receive an inheritance and if you do receive one the median is substantial, but so few do that the “median” across the five year period studied was only $15k for whites vs $3k for blacks as the vast majority inherited nothing. Inheritance is definitely a significant component to the racial wealth gap but it’s not the entire thing, and not all or even most differences in inheritance come from racism instead of differences in how families spent and saved over the years.
Unfortunately there seems to be an issue with wealth/status transmission in the black community. A longitudinal study using US census data found that black men raised in rich households were far less likely to remain that way as adults then white men. The NYT attributes this to racism, but no such gap exist between white and black women which doesn’t make sense if racism is the explanation. This is probably because black women commit fewer crimes and are more likely to attain education than black men are.
Reparations from people who didn’t do anything to people who didn’t have anything done to them would probably destroy the country and it’s certainly not worth it if would just be gone in a generation anyway.
Created:
I recently came across this article from an individual who spent almost five years working at a pediatric transgender center. The author who identifies as "left of Bernie Sanders" is also married to a transgendered man, so she is a biased source in favor of this form of "care." I distinctly remember at least three times on this website I've argued someone into a corner about how barbaric and damaging these practices are, only for them to eventually retreat to "well we need to trust the experts" and ignoring everything I've had to say. Unfortunately, experts can be just as ideologically blinded as the rest of us and it's often the case that someone who chooses to focus their career in certain fields may be more ideological than most. This article is interesting because it provides a first hand account of what minors have to do to get on "gender affirming" drugs, and what those drugs actually do. Needless to say, it's beyond obvious that offering these "treatments" to mentally ill minors doesn't have a defensible basis. Some choice quotes below:
On the explosion of "transgender" identification among mentally ill teenaged girls:
"Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.
I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.
This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.
The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum. Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).
The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate."
On how minors qualified for access to untested treatments with lifelong consequences:
"To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
That’s all it took. "
Examples of the side effects:
"When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor."
....
"We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.
Other girls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, “Wow, we hurt this kid.”
There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist."
"Doctors" using these life altering drugs with poorly studied long term side effects as a catch-all treatment:
"That same thought came up again with another case. This one was in spring of 2022 and concerned a young man who had intense obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested as a desire to cut off his penis after he masturbated. This patient expressed no gender dysphoria, but he got hormones, too. I asked the doctor what protocol he was following, but I never got a straight answer. "
In 20 years when this stuff is viewed the same way as we view lobotomies, nobody is going to admit they were in favor of it. What an abject failure and betrayal by the very people who take an oath to do no harm. It is beyond any reasonable doubt that an unknown, but likely six figure, number of children have fallen into this trap. Their mental illness manifests in dislike of their changing bodies, so under the flimsiest of justification they've been prescribed cancer drugs, chemical castration drugs, or given permanent surgeries. Their minds and bodies are permanently altered chasing an impossible to reach goal, one that the so called experts lied to them about.
Created:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
Again, this goes way beyond welfare money. This is ALL federal dollars going to a state. Basically, we are going to limit “welfare” to farmers and veterans and corporations who are getting money that they didn’t pay into the U.S. Treasury. A state shouldn’t get more money back than they send.
Right, you aren’t just going after poor people. Veterans shouldn’t get their pensions and seniors shouldn’t get their social security or Medicare based on the state they live in, even though those are federal programs, because of reasons
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
For god's sakes why??? Ignoring that historically, centrally planned governments inevitably collapse under their own incompetence, the current level of federalism isn't even sustainable. Why increase it? Sabotage maybe? Then I approve of course.
I mean more states rights. I’ve seen federalism used as a shorthand for dividing powers between the federal government and the states, right now I think the federal government has way too much power for such a huge and diverse country
Created:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
Welfare? That’s pennies. This isn’t about welfare, this about all the federal dollars that go to a state for everything from federal pensions to grant money to farm subsidies to disaster relief. Billions and billions of federal dollars. Welfare, like food stamps or section 8 vouchers is a drop in the bucket.
in 2022, only 16% of spending was on “everything else”, 49% of federal spending was on entitlements, which poor people disproportionately rely on
Created:
-->
@Greyparrot
I want more federalism so I’m actually good with what he’s saying as long as the states get broad leeway in everything like we were supposed to from the beginning. But what’s he’s saying is so stupid from a liberal perspective that I can’t help but poor at it
Created:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
That’s not true. It’s the good ole boys who work with their hands and drive pickup trucks.
Wrong. Welfare users are disproportionately black and hispanic people, especially in the south. Someone with a blue collar job who can afford a pickup truck usually doesn’t qualify for welfare
Well their must not be very many of them because those states have Republicans in elected office.
yes they are often outnumbered. That’s why they’re called…minorities. And you want to make poor peoples lives harder because you don’t like the way middle class and wealthy people (who often dislike welfare policies) in their states vote.
Created:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
I don’t think so. There’s no evidence they were advocating for rich states to support poor states. But even if they did, things have changed, it’s been decades and it’s perfectly fine to change the system. I would love poor states and rural states to learn how bad off they would be without the blue states.Let people like Barry Goldwater see how fucked his state would be without socialism.
The people in those states who would get fucked are for the most part dem voters. I don’t understand why you want to hurt your own voters for the crime of living in the wrong state
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@PREZ-HILTON
He said don't punch down but nearly every post he makes about me is talking shit about me being poor, southern or uneducated
He’s a very rude and unpleasant person, I still can’t tell if the account is a troll or not. I’m leaning towards troll because he comes off as very stupid but in the most annoying way. What I mean by that is that he seems to miss the point at least 75% of the time someone talks to him. The quality of his posts and arguments are generally so low that people just write it off as he failed to understand what others are saying, but more and more I think he understands but is intentionally missing the point to annoy people. The actual person behind the account may be much smarter than the account let’s on
Created:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
FDR and LBJ didn’t set out to move money from rich states to poor states. It wanted to move money from rich people to poor people. If some states don’t have many rich people then it’s tough shit.
Why? Why should state of residence matter one bit in a federal program? FDR and LBJ would vehemently disagree with you. On the other hand Barry Goldwater would approve
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
A well done fake video of Biden reading off a 4chan copypasta is objectively funny, sorry I don’t make the rules
Created:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
No, I’m saying that the money a rich person in Mississippi pays would go back to Mississippi to help his fellow Mississippians. And the states would get to decide how to spend all the money they get back from the Feds that was paid to the US Treasury in federal income taxes.
Let me put it a different way. If we aren’t all entitled to benefits based on the same formula, the states are NEVER going to agree to letting the federal government set the tax rates and other policies. What you’re advocating is undoing everything that FDR and LBJ did lol. Which more power to you…but you should probably change your screen name and avatar in that case
Created:
Posted in:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
Created:
-->
@IwantRooseveltagain
For instance, I don’t think farmers in Iowa should get more money from the Federal government than the state of Iowa sends in tax money. Whatever Federal income tax comes in to the US Treasury from Iowa’s businesses and individuals in 2022, that should be the maximum pot of money they get from the Feds in 2023 to divide up however the state wants to.So Iowans support Iowans, not New Yorkers support Iowans. But this policy would just kill the red welfare states.
So you’re a big advocate of federalism then. The logic breaks down pretty rapidly though unless you’re willing to pivot towards way more states rights. For example, if we aren’t all entitled to the same benefits (like having the same social security formula, the same formula for who qualifies for welfare or food stamps and how much etc) but it’s based on the state you live in, why should a wealthy person in a rich state pay the same tax rate as a wealthy person in a more well off state if his fellow citizens don’t reap any of the benefits? Under your system a rich person in Mississippi would have to pay a lot in federal taxes but poor people in Mississippi wouldn’t get that revenue. I don’t see why the states would agree to this unless they're given leeway on their own tax and fiscal policies and the federal government stays out completely.
You also create a strong incentive for states to fight over the most productive citizens and offload the most expensive ones to other states. Is that really a position you want to put people in, as a leftist? Texas or New York or wherever doing whatever they can to force their poor people to move?
Look, we all know where the money is. The states with the biggest economies and tax receipts are no secret. The Northeast and California is where by far most of the money comes from. It’s also where most of the people live.40 million in California40 million combined in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut.That’s 80 million people in just 5 blue states. 25% of the American population lives in 5 states.
Top ten states by population:
California - blue
Texas - red
New York - blue
Florida - red
Illinois - blue
Pennsylvania - purple
Ohio - red
Michigan - purple
Georgia - purple
North Carolina - purple
People also move between states. Florida for example a lot of people retire to, so it
Created: