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[MrRoboto75]

Or, In Soviet Russia, abortion has you.

Man, I wish

I just wish they'd drop the marketing slogan of "pro-life" as they are barely pro about life at all.  Once the baby is shat out into the world, they actually don't care at all what happens next.

[Reelya]

Bill Hicks ranted about the whole "think of the children!" thing. He asks, what, once they reach a certain age they're no longer on your love list or something.

Basically it's a hollow slogan you tack onto whatever else you want to push, as an emotional blackmail appeal, as if you promote your policy with "think of the children" then anyone who disagrees with the policy is by extension "anti-children", regardless of how fucking dumb the policy is and whatever effects it has on actual children, which are usually deleterious.

[Max™]

I use forced-birther incidentally.

As for profit, was talking with the missus about this and how fucked up certain things we just take for granted in the US are.

Spoiler: Fuck capitalism. (click to show/hide)

Throne toilets cause hemorrhoids, constipation, exacerbate numerous other conditions and as a result we get halfass fixes like squatty-potty stools to raise your feet so you can make stool easier.
Toilet paper is one of those things weirdly related to weed I'm guessing, paper manufacturers love the idea of people buying tp all the time, using it every time they go, and flushing it before going back to buy more. Can I say for sure they worked to demonize bidets? No, but I'm not surprised I didn't know that you can get retrofit bidet kits for any of our stupidly designed USian toilets until I saw them on twitter.
Disposable razors are fucking stupid, guy faces look weird naked, but convincing dudes that manliness=bare face and disposable razors > straight razors was a clever grift by gilette and them. The electric shaver companies learned from it by discouraging the idea that you can just open them up and clean them out, so instead you should just buy new heads and lotion regularly, or shell out for a cleaning station.
Big box hardware stores love to push their power tools on people, but as a backup they always make sure to have plenty of handsaws around, lots of them with induction hardened teeth that do stay sharp longer, but can't be resharpened unless you want to completely knock them off until you have bare metal and know how to recut teeth. Hard to find good files at one either, huh. Easier to just buy another disposable handsaw, and hey it's cheaper than a circular saw right! I mean, until you buy enough of them it is.
The real fucked up one though, the one that inspired murderous rage when I noticed it, is tampon companies. They set up deals to buy entire aisles from grocery stores to line with their products, and I just bet there are conditions like not being allowed to stock menstrual cups. First time I saw a cup I thought it was some new invention, but they apparently date back to the 1800's, though we DO have new soft feel and bodysafe silicone formulations, though we've had those long enough I was really baffled why I only saw one randomly online one day. Then I realized forcing women to come back and buy a box of these fucked up things that screw with their ph, are uncomfortable as fuck, can cause toxic shock AND KILL WOMEN, and are single use... well that only makes sense if you're out to get repeat customers. Every woman, every month, for a huge chunk of their life? Fuck you tampax and all the rest, fuck you to death and beyond.

I'm sure there are many more examples of these business models that worked great when media buys could guarantee ignorance of better alternatives but start to fall apart when the internet makes it possible to just stumble across these "new improved" but actually old school versions of things.

Being in a hypercapitalist dystopia is fucked up for so many reasons, and most of them aren't even obvious at first.

As for the political positions...

Conservative =/= Fucking Fascists.
We can look at Zipf's Law and the related Pareto Distribution here to guess that a few percent of people are responsible for a much larger percent of anything be it online or in person.

If 20% of the right are responsible for 80% of the fascistic bullshit they're apparently fine with, that's still a full fifth of them down with being fucking nazis, and trump is the smallest percent with the largest share of bullshit there is.

There may be others on here further left than I am, but there's not many of us out here, an ideal society to me would look like the Culture with benevolent AI gods, a default to polite peaceful anarchosocialism with the option to strike out and set up something else if you want.

In practice I just go with socialist and futurist like Marx was, not Lenin, but I can't shed my inherent urge to throw off any claim by anyone that they have power over me.

Government shouldn't exist to force people to do what it wants, it should enable people trying to do better at being themselves, and it should provide a backdrop of safety from various forms of harm.

I don't need the threat of law enforcement to not come over to your house, rob, attack, or murder you. I'm just not going to do it, it's not cool, by refusing such behavior I'm making a statement that others should not do that to me.

Ideally everybody would be able to live like that just fine barring actual fucking psychopaths and the like because people aren't born abusive nazi pricks.

In practice I'm confident that the only reason anybody feels a need for police and prison is "to protect me and my family from criminals" rather than "to keep me from doing some murders" for the vast majority of people.

If our government was doing a good job making sure people don't fall through the cracks and end up struggling and suffering unnecessarily then all but a fraction of a percent of violent crime and theft would disappear.

This is where I disagree most strongly with conservatives: many argue freedom requires the freedom to be a piece of shit and the freedom to fail. I contend freedom from unnecessary failure is more important. Freedom to vs freedom from. Libertarians are an extreme example of the former, I'm an extreme example of the latter.

Conservatives still value freedom and peace. Fascists are willing to trade liberty for security and peace for vengeance over petty grievances.

Hank Hill was a conservative, he was the type you may have heard called a compassionate conservative. He was a decent guy at heart, and when he found out he was wrong about something or being ignorant he felt bad and tried to improve himself.

I'd have no problem with someone like him as my neighbor, I knew some of them when I lived in Texas, though Dallas was a much more liberal area than the surrounding burbs and exurbs trended.

Hank Hill would be horrified at modern republicans going along with someone like Trump.
Mike Judge is horrified that we treated Idiocracy like a roadmap.

[MrRoboto75]

I use forced-birther incidentally.

As for profit, was talking with the missus about this and how fucked up certain things we just take for granted in the US are.

Spoiler: Fuck capitalism. (click to show/hide)

Throne toilets cause hemorrhoids, constipation, exacerbate numerous other conditions and as a result we get halfass fixes like squatty-potty stools to raise your feet so you can make stool easier.
Toilet paper is one of those things weirdly related to weed I'm guessing, paper manufacturers love the idea of people buying tp all the time, using it every time they go, and flushing it before going back to buy more. Can I say for sure they worked to demonize bidets? No, but I'm not surprised I didn't know that you can get retrofit bidet kits for any of our stupidly designed USian toilets until I saw them on twitter.
Disposable razors are fucking stupid, guy faces look weird naked, but convincing dudes that manliness=bare face and disposable razors > straight razors was a clever grift by gilette and them. The electric shaver companies learned from it by discouraging the idea that you can just open them up and clean them out, so instead you should just buy new heads and lotion regularly, or shell out for a cleaning station.
Big box hardware stores love to push their power tools on people, but as a backup they always make sure to have plenty of handsaws around, lots of them with induction hardened teeth that do stay sharp longer, but can't be resharpened unless you want to completely knock them off until you have bare metal and know how to recut teeth. Hard to find good files at one either, huh. Easier to just buy another disposable handsaw, and hey it's cheaper than a circular saw right! I mean, until you buy enough of them it is.
The real fucked up one though, the one that inspired murderous rage when I noticed it, is tampon companies. They set up deals to buy entire aisles from grocery stores to line with their products, and I just bet there are conditions like not being allowed to stock menstrual cups. First time I saw a cup I thought it was some new invention, but they apparently date back to the 1800's, though we DO have new soft feel and bodysafe silicone formulations, though we've had those long enough I was really baffled why I only saw one randomly online one day. Then I realized forcing women to come back and buy a box of these fucked up things that screw with their ph, are uncomfortable as fuck, can cause toxic shock AND KILL WOMEN, and are single use... well that only makes sense if you're out to get repeat customers. Every woman, every month, for a huge chunk of their life? Fuck you tampax and all the rest, fuck you to death and beyond.

I'm sure there are many more examples of these business models that worked great when media buys could guarantee ignorance of better alternatives but start to fall apart when the internet makes it possible to just stumble across these "new improved" but actually old school versions of things.

Being in a hypercapitalist dystopia is fucked up for so many reasons, and most of them aren't even obvious at first.

It all starts because humans face great difficulty when it comes to sitting in a room and feeling content.

[Reelya]

Government shouldn't exist to force people to do what it wants, it should enable people trying to do better at being themselves, and it should provide a backdrop of safety from various forms of harm.

I don't need the threat of law enforcement to not come over to your house, rob, attack, or murder you. I'm just not going to do it, it's not cool, by refusing such behavior I'm making a statement that others should not do that to me.

The problem is that you need a guarantee that nobody would do that without the threat. That Trust presentation which was linked in threads including the Podcasts thread in my bio, that covers it pretty well. Fundamentally what we're doing when we talk about what role the government should have is asking whether we should stack the numbers in a payoff matrix such that we reach a different long-term equilibrium. So, in other words, the goal shouldn't be "stop all crime" at the expense of everything else, but the government still needs to dis-incentivize crime such than in the long run, those agents disappear.

Note that in basically any of those simulations, the "always cooperate" bots die out really fast, unless they live in a predator-free environment.

EDIT: note that the Pareto Principle can be applied here, too. Whether or not the "average" person needs laws to prevent them doing bad things is misleading, if 80% of the bad things are done by 20% of the people.

[Naturegirl1999]

We/government need to figure out why people do crimes and fix the system so those reasons no longer exist

[Reelya]

We/government need to figure out why people do crimes and fix the system so those reasons no longer exist

People commit crimes even if there is no government. If you want "fix the system" so that those things never ever happen, you ultimately end up with mind control.

EDIT: my point is that if you remove all motives for crime you ultimately remove motives for everything. It's not possible to remove motivation itself in a clinical way that only removes things on a list of things we shouldn't do without seriously crippling people in other ways.

[Max™]

Government shouldn't exist to force people to do what it wants, it should enable people trying to do better at being themselves, and it should provide a backdrop of safety from various forms of harm.

I don't need the threat of law enforcement to not come over to your house, rob, attack, or murder you. I'm just not going to do it, it's not cool, by refusing such behavior I'm making a statement that others should not do that to me.

The problem is that you need a guarantee that nobody would do that without the threat. That Trust presentation which was linked in threads including the Podcasts thread in my bio, that covers it pretty well. Fundamentally what we're doing when we talk about what role the government should have is asking whether we should stack the numbers in a payoff matrix such that we reach a different long-term equilibrium. So, in other words, the goal shouldn't be "stop all crime" at the expense of everything else, but the government still needs to dis-incentivize crime such than in the long run, those agents disappear.

Note that in basically any of those simulations, the "always cooperate" bots die out really fast, unless they live in a predator-free environment.

EDIT: note that the Pareto Principle can be applied here, too. Whether or not the "average" person needs laws to prevent them doing bad things is misleading, if 80% of the bad things are done by 20% of the people.

Yeah, there's no button to push to instantly stop crime, but we could stop pushing the buttons that lead to more crime right now, and should.

We can stop distributing money upwards to fewer and fewer people, stop removing safeguards from corporate efforts to maximise profit above all else, eliminate the likelihood that illness or injury ruins you financially, plus generally decriminalize simply being poor and the related cluster of such laws that exist to this day.

We have a government that actively reinforces those societally harmful behaviors and which could simply stop doing them tomorrow, and there'd be a lag effect before a new equilibrium certainly but there's no way it would lead to an increase of violence and crime because at no point would it be a blanket Purge type "murder is legal, woo, go nuts!" change, just stopping efforts to make people poor and punish them for being poor.

[Naturegirl1999]

Government shouldn't exist to force people to do what it wants, it should enable people trying to do better at being themselves, and it should provide a backdrop of safety from various forms of harm.

I don't need the threat of law enforcement to not come over to your house, rob, attack, or murder you. I'm just not going to do it, it's not cool, by refusing such behavior I'm making a statement that others should not do that to me.

The problem is that you need a guarantee that nobody would do that without the threat. That Trust presentation which was linked in threads including the Podcasts thread in my bio, that covers it pretty well. Fundamentally what we're doing when we talk about what role the government should have is asking whether we should stack the numbers in a payoff matrix such that we reach a different long-term equilibrium. So, in other words, the goal shouldn't be "stop all crime" at the expense of everything else, but the government still needs to dis-incentivize crime such than in the long run, those agents disappear.

Note that in basically any of those simulations, the "always cooperate" bots die out really fast, unless they live in a predator-free environment.

EDIT: note that the Pareto Principle can be applied here, too. Whether or not the "average" person needs laws to prevent them doing bad things is misleading, if 80% of the bad things are done by 20% of the people.

Yeah, there's no button to push to instantly stop crime, but we could stop pushing the buttons that lead to more crime right now, and should.

We can stop distributing money upwards to fewer and fewer people, stop removing safeguards from corporate efforts to maximise profit above all else, eliminate the likelihood that illness or injury ruins you financially, plus generally decriminalize simply being poor and the related cluster of such laws that exist to this day.

We have a government that actively reinforces those societally harmful behaviors and which could simply stop doing them tomorrow, and there'd be a lag effect before a new equilibrium certainly but there's no way it would lead to an increase of violence and crime because at no point would it be a blanket Purge type "murder is legal, woo, go nuts!" change, just stopping efforts to make people poor and punish them for being poor.

I agree with all of this, sadly I don’t think either party is willing to do this

[Reelya]

Well I'll trust you on that, but remember I don't live there, I live in a place where I live in the most expensive city in the country, and have save almost $40k from a minimum wage job in under 2 years, and I get free healthcare. :/

So my perspective may be a bit different. However, some of the things you say you need to change are things we also have here, but we don't have the problem you're saying it's related to, so I'd suggest considering that. Just like healthcare can be compared with different countries and realize that conservative views on private health are clearly wrong, you can look at economic systems in different nations and that can shed light on what changes are important vs what changes are not important. Saying some aspect needs to go hard-left to have a basic quality of life is clearly not correct if there are examples of other nations which fixed that problem without going hard-left, the same as conservatives are often wrong about healthcare.

[Max™]

Oh yeah, my preference would be leftward ho, but I'd be fine with a more conservative "let's just stop making people poor and punishing them for it" version all day erryday.

[Naturegirl1999]

Sadly, some US citizens think healthcare for all is far left, when in other countries it’s not considered that. I think the Cold War might have shifted the Overton Window, mind, I am only 21 and am making guesses based on what people say here/how people seem to have reacted to Medicare for All/history

Ninja’d

Oh yeah, my preference would be leftward ho, but I'd be fine with a more conservative "let's just stop making people poor and punishing them for it" version all day erryday.

I also agree with this

[MaxTheFox]

Oh yeah, my preference would be leftward ho, but I'd be fine with a more conservative "let's just stop making people poor and punishing them for it" version all day erryday.

I also agree with this

Fair enough TBH. I mean the latter is my default stance.

[MrRoboto75]

Sadly, some US citizens think healthcare for all is far left, when in other countries it’s not considered that.

"How will we pay for it?"  He says, sending yet another million dollar missile to Iraq, on a multi million dollar jet, meanwhile paying extra to a private insurer for less coverage to less people while investors pocket the difference.

[Starver]

No, the big gay is now required, by law.

But must not be paid for with Bitcoin...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

You must always use Dogecoin.

And use Dogecoin always.