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[ZBridges]

Understanding that people aren't just randomly born terrible, actually making their lives better, and making sure they know why their lives got better is the solution.

If your premise is correct, people aren't just randomly born terrible, then making their lives better solves everything.

But if you're wrong, and people are in fact just randomly born terrible, then making their lives better just gives them more time and opportunity to procreate, making more terrible people, increasing in number until they have a sufficient population to influence democratic policy, leading to widespread intolerance, hatred, and worse.

You fear an Ultra-Trump down the line. I fear that your attempts to prevent that outcome will inevitably make it a reality.

Eugenics?  I think we had a war about that.

[SalmonGod]

Understanding that people aren't just randomly born terrible, actually making their lives better, and making sure they know why their lives got better is the solution.

If your premise is correct, people aren't just randomly born terrible, then making their lives better solves everything.

But if you're wrong, and people are in fact just randomly born terrible, then making their lives better just gives them more time and opportunity to procreate, making more terrible people, increasing in number until they have a sufficient population to influence democratic policy, leading to widespread intolerance, hatred, and worse.

You fear an Ultra-Trump down the line. I fear that your attempts to prevent that outcome will inevitably make it a reality.

*takes a couple steps back slowly*

[Reelya]

I think the bare sliver of hope Trump represents is what draws them in. One prominent QAnon motto is "trust the plan". To combat that, you can't just say the plan is bullshit and there's no actual plan, you need a more compelling plan. Like, if there was constructive stuff to do, those people wouldn't be sitting at computers seething at the system, they'd be doing stuff. You gotta make it look foolish by offering a viable alternative. (for example, Australia, minimum wage is $20 an hour. After saving money on a minimum wage job for just a couple of years here you could actually afford to buy a decent sized house out in the country, if not in Melbourne or Sydney. The social contract therefore isn't quite as broken here: not being able to afford a big house right in the city is really a first world problem).

A big part of it is the social contract. Do the right thing, work hard, and you'll be prosperous. Promising to bring the coal jobs back is about promising to bring back the social contract around that. The whole learn to code thing for coal miners was very tone deaf.

[bloop_bleep]

Understanding that people aren't just randomly born terrible, actually making their lives better, and making sure they know why their lives got better is the solution.

If your premise is correct, people aren't just randomly born terrible, then making their lives better solves everything.

But if you're wrong, and people are in fact just randomly born terrible, then making their lives better just gives them more time and opportunity to procreate, making more terrible people, increasing in number until they have a sufficient population to influence democratic policy, leading to widespread intolerance, hatred, and worse.

You fear an Ultra-Trump down the line. I fear that your attempts to prevent that outcome will inevitably make it a reality.

I see we already have an Ultra-Trump before us.

[Reelya]

Although every single line of evidence available to us in the real world shows that as people's standards of living rise, they have less kids, blowing a hole in the entire theory. And they simultaneously promote the theory that Democrats are killing off black people via abortions with the idea that Democrats are trying to out-breed white people through overpopulating non-white people. Such is the logic of people who have injected the koolaid directly into their brainstem.

EDIT: note a more reasonable interpretation is that Democrats are interested in improving the quality of life of all people who are actually alive, and are agnostic on how that affects the proportion of different races. So they'll support things that both increase the number of black people (better medicine access, childcare etc) and decreases the number of black people (access to abortions) based on the principle that both things promote quality of life.

The race mix doesn't even factor into Democratic thinking, that's a Republican obsession, but they project race as a motive onto Democratic decisions.

[Lidku]

Understanding that people aren't just randomly born terrible, actually making their lives better, and making sure they know why their lives got better is the solution.

If your premise is correct, people aren't just randomly born terrible, then making their lives better solves everything.

But if you're wrong, and people are in fact just randomly born terrible, then making their lives better just gives them more time and opportunity to procreate, making more terrible people, increasing in number until they have a sufficient population to influence democratic policy, leading to widespread intolerance, hatred, and worse.

You fear an Ultra-Trump down the line. I fear that your attempts to prevent that outcome will inevitably make it a reality.

lol

[thompson]

Although every single line of evidence available to us in the real world shows that as people's standards of living rise, they have less kids, blowing a hole in the entire theory. And they simultaneously promote the theory that Democrats are killing off black people via abortions with the idea that Democrats are trying to out-breed white people through overpopulating non-white people. Such is the logic of people who have injected the koolaid directly into their brainstem.

Yes, but relative standard of living is falling, and people tend to assess their social status through that lense.

I can’t say I’ve ever met any who actually believes that crap about white genocide, but I guess it’s proponents mostly stick to anonymous chat rooms so who knows. My take is that it’s a radical minority, with the odd low-education type throwing it up when they really have nothing else to say against their political opponents.

Belief in climate change to be a delusion is more widespread, from my experience. I’d wager that’s the #1 headwind for progressive parties going forward. That particular one has real economic consequences, so I don’t expect them to give in without a fight.

Clarification: I really don’t think racism is a vote winner. Defending (real or imaginary) high-paying oil/gas/coal jobs is definitely a big one. Self affirmation by “sticking it to the libs” probably comes in second. All in all, I don’t really see a lot of room for Trump 2. Conservatives might have supported Trump 1 while he was winning, now that he’s officially a loser I expect most of them to move on and rally behind whoever they think can win in 2024.

[Folly]

Eugenics?  I think we had a war about that.

I'm not proposing Eugenics. I'm proposing that we let self-destructive assholes reap what they sow, rather than carebearing them into forced prosperity.
We don't need to purge the gene pool of impurities. Just let nature take it's course.

[Reelya]

Social Darwinism then: let poverty and misery spread unchecked because it'll weed out the gene pool.

The problem here is that this approach doesn't turn you into a superman state, it turns you into India. People under those sorts of pressures have more kids because the kids become sources of income / labor and they become the support network in your old age since you of course also got rid of old age pensions as part of this weeding out the weak plan, and you need to plan for a lot of kids because of the inevitably high child mortality rates such a plan would create.

Basically, this "let the weak fend for themselves" plan isn't some new and radical proposal, it's how the Third World operates, and we've seen the consequences. It's what caused the steady trickle of those uneducated immigrants and refugees in the first place. So yeah, you didn't really create some radical new proposal that's going to toughen up and improve the racial stock, you're basically proposing creating the slums of Calcutta, but in the USA so it's white people in the gutter having 15 kids, which I guess is an improvement in some ways, since you won't need to import so many sub minimum wage people anymore since the local pool of that will blow out, big time.

As evidence, note that the places in the USA with the high rates of childbirth aren't the Democrat controlled areas, they're consistently places where the Republicans have been in charge for a long time. See this list of US states by fertility rate and cross reference by the 2020 election map, the top 13 states by fertility rates all voted Trump, so they're hardcore Republican areas.

Cutting social services in fact directly causes the blow out in family sizes especially among the poor, it doesn't weed out the weak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_fertility_rate
Also see list of US states by infant mortality rate, also lead by red states. So i guess they're taking your proposal to heart. It isn't working however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_infant_mortality_rates

[thompson]

For what it’s worth, gene editing is a thing now. I’d like to see it rolled out to eliminate genetic disease. A cure for stupid would be great too*. I know some people might get a little squeamish about that sort of thing, but the genetic disease burden is growing and the “natural” method of having the weak die isn’t that appealing.

*This is a joke. The cure for stupid is education. Gene editing for intelligence probably wouldn’t work as there are too many individual genes responsible. Apologies for the tangent.

[Reelya]

We want to go slow on the gene editing in real humans. For example, if we're talking embryos, we can just screen for the bad genes and do IVF for the embryos that don't have that gene, no need to edit the embryos in the first place. So that leaves the main use as being for gene therapy for already living humans, and since screening can be rolled out much cheaper and less dangerously than trying to hack the genome of already living people, there will be an ever-decreasing window of usefulness for gene therapies. We should still look into it, but providing mass screening would be far more efficient and less controversial than trying to edit babies*. Also, all that effort would basically be invested in making something we can already make for free: babies that don't have that genetic disease.

EDIT: *here's the main gist. Think about how many incidents of a specific genetic disease are prevented per screening vs per gene editing an embryo, vs gene therapies on an already-alive person. Then consider how much money each one costs to enact, and whether or not we have enough money to 100% roll out the solution. The basic screening technology would work out as the least-expensive option per number of cases prevented, so it's the long term best option to deal with the problem. Only once you have 100% screening, only then would it be worth investing any remaining money in the gene therapies, in terms of saving the most people.

[scriver]

I’m not sure there is much anyone can do about the incel problem. In every generation there will always be someone left on the bench, and biology doesn’t help as natural selection largely works by excluding the unfit (with females performing the selection in most species).

Not letting people use computers or the internet until they're 25 or so will help.

[Starver]

Let them use the internet, but only port 23.

[delphonso]

This discussion got weird.

I'm seeing a lot of "now the protests will end" as if that's a bad thing from the Right on my facebook. I think the idea is that protests were a Democrat Plot pushed by the Mainstream Media. The world in which the far right lives is one where the Democrats are capable of incredible organization and competence.

[JoshuaFH]

You'd think that level of competence would be ipso facto qualification for ruling the world, and to just welcome their new liberal overlords instead.