Politics/Slapfights - Ancient history to modern day!

[Mazder]

The logic that makes the NHS a moral system to advocate for, and fund, runs contrary to the practice of actively preventing future tax payers from existing. If it's good to provide free medical care to everyone, and importing people to work on it to expand access is also good, then it is evil to knowingly reduce the future funding of the system. To provide abortion through the NHS is to reduce the potential of the NHS to provide better service.

Something to think about. How can it be good to prevent future good from occurring?

That's just....dumb.
No-one is equating the health service demands babies to be born so we can tax them later. Providing abortions for free on the NHS means they can be performed if and when necessary and easily. Especially if combined with other NHS practices, such as sexual health clinics, free visits to GP's and advice, not only for those wanting to make sure they don't get pregnant but for those looking to start a family.

The future funding of the system is dependant on human lives, yes, but NHS abortions being free is not a threat to the NHS and honestly never will be. Because it's not just about the abortions themselves. The NHS also has maternity care. It brings life in much, much more than it ends it.

Plus to the NHS people aren't commodities. That's a very American way of seeing the problem.

Abstinence is the only absolutely reliable method. Followed by multiple forms of contraception used correctly. Followed by one form of contraception used correctly. Followed by the way people actually act. No amount of education and free contraceptives is going to stop all accidental pregnancies, but it sure will reduce the number of them, and as a corollary, the number of intentional pregnancies too.

Given 45% or so of US abortions come from black people, who are not uneducated, touch-starved, or repressed, we can conclude other factors can result in many accidental pregnancies. For what reason do you think any abortions are performed on women who didn't know what sex is for?

[/quote][/quote]
Um....no? No it's not reliable because it's just avoiding the act all together. It's like avoiding running out of gas by cycling everywhere. Yeah you'll never run out but it's because you're never using the car.
I mean abstinence is just prohibition but for your body. We all know prohibition doesn't work.

Teen pregnancies are purportedly higher in red states that practice abstinence over contraceptives. To me that sounds like it's not working.

So 45% of the abortions are done by 13-14% of the population, the same 13-14% who are more likely below the poverty line and can't support a family and if Raga's brief summary of prices is correct, one $40 payment vs monthly £30 payments starts to make sense to me on that front.

Sex is not just for procreation. It's as much a social activity. And the reason why they're performed is usually because they're seen/used as a form of contraception instead of the other methods due to possibly poor education or the American culture being against it in areas heavily influenced by abstinence methods.

[Mobius_118]

That's because red states are notoriously the last in education, health care, social protections, list goes on. That region of the US is called the bible belt because logic and science take a backseat to white jesus and greed.

Mazder, you have to realize that conservatives and libertarians are stubborn against reality. I would pity them but I ran out of fucks to give.

[Ragabul]

When I say it's a bugaboo, I don't mean teen pregnancies are neutral or good. I mean it's unrepresentative of who is actually getting abortions and who would be getting "punished" in some hypothetical land in which they are made illegal again so it's simply empty as a useful scare tactic. The rate has been declining markedly for years. The rises and dips in that chart correspond to rises and dips in the overall fertility rate. And the overwhelming bulk of people who get them are in their twenties or poor women who already have kids.

For all that Mobs is trying to troll, he is about half correct. The South disproportionately has more abortions than other regions and the reason it does is not rocket science. The South has the highest concentration of poor people of any region and has had for most of its history independent of trends in religiosity. (This was equally true in the 1700s and 1800s when New England was the hotbed of religious fervor and the South was the land of relative licentiousness. Going back to my obsession with that Albion's Seed stuff, out of wedlock birth was notably higher in the Borderer regions than in the Puritan regions). The South also has the complicating factor of having a large variety of types of poor people who have been in open to low key conflict with each other for most of its history, which very much complicates various redistributive & welfare agendas. A rule of thumb is that the more homogeneous a society is demographically, the easier it is to implement this stuff. There is the stereotypical Scots-Irish white trash. There are descendants of slaves (who depending on where you are can make up 15-30% of the population. An ugly subtext liberals often don't mention when making fun of places like Mississippi and Alabama is that they have among the largest black populations in the country which disproportionately explains why they are so poor). Add to this mix that some places in the South like Texas, Florida, and Georgia are now also a magnet for low skill immigrants in a way they were not during the immigration boom of the Gilded Age in which immigrants overwhelming stayed in places like New York and Chicago. (I read somewhere that 1 in 10 workers in Texas is an illegal immigrant).

Comparing the USA to Sweden or Britain always needed some stretching to be credible, but comparing the South to them is borderline nonsense. Until the very recent past, a more accurate comparison would be some place like Brazil. At the time Britain was instituting socialized healthcare, the South still had Jim Crow and the overwhelming bulk of poor workers still worked on farms. The South did not start industrializing in a really meaningful way until the 1940s (to a large degree because of investment of military facilities which is why so many ginormous military bases are in the South). FDR was still trying to get electricity to various parts of the South in the 1930s. My dad's family still had an outdoor outhouse in the 1950s.

The only thing that's going to "fix" the South is the slow, tedious march of time coupled with sustained and growing prosperity. At some distant point in the future (probably not within my lifetime), it will probably cease to be a distinctive region in any meaningful cultural or economic sense. It is currently growing like a weed. There is a notable trend of black people *returning* to the South now after many left during the original Great Migration. There is also a lot of affluent white internal migration driven by cheap housing and growing industry in places like Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia.

But in the meantime, it *is* a culturally and economically distinctive region and a huge percentage of "what the hell is wrong with the USA anyway" comes down to this reality. Take a country which is basically Britain or some other Northern European country (a country that emerged into modernity largely as an industrial and commercial shipping powerhouse) and stick it together with a country that is more like Brazil (with a highly racialized regimented caste system based on extractive agriculture) and make them share a government that is constantly used to try to settle cultural & social disputes and you will be getting closer to what the reality of the United States has been for the last 200 or more years.

*Edit* This is one reason we've been still fighting about Roe since 1979 and using language that is bizarrely appropriate for 1979 (coathanger abortions, lysol abortions, etc.) instead of language that actually matches the reality today (declining abortion rates, abortion by pill, less teen pregnancy, etc.). Unlike gay rights which was a slow, patient capture of the public's approval over 40 years, Roe was a top down decision that took 0 account of local sensibilities or public opinion. Maybe people feel this was warranted, that it was analogous to Jim Crow or slavery and *had* to be forcibly addressed by outside entities. But doing so was always going to create a massive backlash (just as abolition and Civil Rights did) except with the added complication that abortion is not particularly sympathetic (unlike Frederick Douglas or besuited preachers being sprayed by water hoses) and a majority of people are actively conflicted or moderate about it. Add to that that many people like me also mostly just don't care about it relative to other topics. This leaves us locked in a battle between two factions of the loudest, screamiest people on the issue who are dedicated to fighting each other in the courts and getting some decree by fiat because they know they cannot actually organically convince the public to adopt either "all abortions are illegal" or "abortions are like candy."

There are only 3 ways to end this scenario.

1. One side or the other overwhelmingly convinces the public they are correct like the gay rights movement did. (Not happening any time soon and especially because neither side is even trying this).

2. It gets knocked down to the states and different regions can implement what they want which will take a large part of the wind out of zealots' sails.

3. One manages to utterly crush the other in law and in the courts (also unlikely), the horrible dystopia the other side was screaming about fails to come into being, and the public *really* stops caring.

[Ragabul]

So 45% of the abortions are done by 13-14% of the population, the same 13-14% who are more likely below the poverty line and can't support a family and if Raga's brief summary of prices is correct, one $40 payment vs monthly £30 payments starts to make sense to me on that front.

Also forgot to address this one tidbit. The $40ish bucks is the price for Plan B and not the price for an abortion by pill. It is the morning after pill. It is extremely effective if taken within 48 hours of unprotected sex. It is available over the counter in most places. I think you still need a prescription (at least in some places) to get it if you are below age 17. This is what I meant by it not being hard to avoid pregnancy. It is *inconvenient.* Women who are going to get abortions have failed on at least two fronts of extremely simple but inconvenient preventative action. 1) They did not spend $5 to $10 bucks on the over the counter contraceptives available at literally every gas station or the $30 dollars (or completely free with insurance) cheap prescription that you can get via a 30 minutes doctor visit (also free with insurance, about $100 without) or they are not using it properly. 2) Upon having unprotected sex (accidental or otherwise), they failed to go get the morning after pill for $40ish bucks.

I understand rape and child abuse occurs. I understand some women are homeless and literally cannot spend $10 on condoms. These account for something like maybe 2% of abortions. Most women *are not* in some "forced birther" trap. They generically screwed up because not screwing up is inconvenient.

Yes, by all means, let's reduce the inconvenience as much as possible but rhetoric implying women are forced into pregnancy unless we live in "abortion is candy" land is patently absurd and false. (I am also not claiming you specifically are saying this if that was unclear).

*Edit*

Also really TMI, but it is also completely possible to regulate your fertility by tracking your own ovulation with a thermometer and needing 0 hormonal birth control at all. This is not "the rhythm method." It is precise and tailored to what your specific body is doing. My sister has used it for 20 years to plan 3 pregnancies and avoid others because she doesn't like the idea of dosing herself with hormones.

Most women are much, much more ignorant about how ovulation cycles work than they are are about how sex works. I would be *totally* for teaching girls this in school. Knowing little or nothing about your own fertility cycles both drastically increases your chance of getting accidentally pregnant and makes it much harder for you to become pregnant if you want to do so.

[Mazder]

Also forgot to address this one tidbit. The $40ish bucks is the price for Plan B and not the price for an abortion by pill. It is the morning after pill. It is extremely effective if taken within 48 hours of unprotected sex. It is available over the counter in most places. I think you still need a prescription (at least in some places) to get it if you are below age 17. This is what I meant by it not being hard to avoid pregnancy. It is *inconvenient.* Women who are going to get abortions have failed on at least two fronts of extremely simple but inconvenient preventative action. 1) They did not spend $5 to $10 bucks on the over the counter contraceptives available at literally every gas station or the $30 dollars (or completely free with insurance) cheap prescription that you can get via a 30 minutes doctor visit (also free with insurance, about $100 without) or they are not using it properly. 2) Upon having unprotected sex (accidental or otherwise), they failed to go get the morning after pill for $40ish bucks.

I understand rape and child abuse occurs. I understand some women are homeless and literally cannot spend $10 on condoms. These account for something like maybe 2% of abortions. Most women *are not* in some "forced birther" trap. They generically screwed up because not screwing up is inconvenient.

Yes, by all means, let's reduce the inconvenience as much as possible but rhetoric implying women are forced into pregnancy unless we live in "abortion is candy" land is patently absurd and false. (I am also not claiming you specifically are saying this if that was unclear).

*Edit*

Also really TMI, but it is also completely possible to regulate your fertility by tracking your own ovulation with a thermometer and needing 0 hormonal birth control at all. This is not "the rhythm method." It is precise and tailored to what your specific body is doing. My sister has used it for 20 years to plan 3 pregnancies and avoid others because she doesn't like the idea of dosing herself with hormones.

Most women are much, much more ignorant about how ovulation cycles work than they are are about how sex works. I would be *totally* for teaching girls this in school. Knowing little or nothing about your own fertility cycles both drastically increases your chance of getting accidentally pregnant and makes it much harder for you to become pregnant if you want to do so.

Ah, okay. IIRC I think that's similar to the abortion that can be done chemically up to...12 weeks? I think it's 12 weeks on the NHS, might be 9, not looked it up in a while.
Either way, still free, lol.

I think it may be a more cultural thing. Or maybe how sex is perceived in areas. If the easy way to avoid pregnancy is made less easy then I guess that's how more accidents can happen.
And I think we hold a similar stance when it comes to abuse victims and rape victims. That carrying a child to full term when having been abused/raped is just prolonging the abuse and is more harm than good.

Women forced into pregnancy unless abortion is candy I don't think is going to/should happen, especially if there are actual support programs in place to assist people. And even if the worst comes to worst and abortions are easier to perform/get approval for and support for without the need for insurance then it at least makes the risks lowered all around.
I don't think you're "accusing me" of it per say, I do hold a weird belief that in the US there are 3 camps (that might also overlap) "pro abortion side who understand sex education and access to abortions go hand in hand apart of a robust sexual health system and "anti-abortion camp who do not understand that and see abortions as birth control and wish to stop that being used as well as actual sex education", and the "abortions are just birth control" camp among both sides.
The latter needs to be focussed on a lot more to get a true agreement out, and that folds into better sex education across the entire country, but definitely more so in the abstinence only areas.

And, yeah, I am 100% more for more education into the subject for all students. It's biology first. They should know.
Should definitely not be the only option in replacement for the abstinence only stuff but it being included is at least a step in the right direction.
If (and I don't know if this is true for all things/places in the US, I just kinda assume it is) doctors consultations regarding sexual stuff was free then they can definitely make that decision as well.

[Ragabul]

Plan B is not a chemical abortificant. If you are 3 weeks pregnant and take it, it won't work. It specifically prevents pregnancy within about a 48 hour window of unprotected sex.

And there is no notable difference in availability of preventative health services for adults that are not explainable by almost entirely economic factors. It is not harder to get birth control in Texas than California or West Virginia than New York City outside of generic problems like divergences in insurance coverage and how far away you are from cheap clinics. The thing keeping somebody in West Podunk from getting pills is not abstinence only education. It's being 50 miles away from the nearest clinic and having no health insurance. And this is equally true of somebody in the hinterlands of California, New York, Texas, or West Virginia. There are differences there in state insurance coverage levels that explain pretty much all divergence for people in similar circumstances.

The crux of the issue has never really evolved so much around what people are taught as what is expected to be provided to them. I could get into a whole other rat's nest of a post about public schools, but it's mostly a myth that you can fix various societal ills by teaching people about it in schools. Do people seriously believe that there are notable numbers of students who are sufficiently non devout to reject sexual abstinence but yet so wholly ignorant of how sex works that they end up accidentally pregnant? The issue is not what gets taught in schools but how much leeway teens have to procure items that allow them to have sex sans pregnancy independent of what their parents may want.

This is at the crux of the issue in the USA. In this country you do not have a "right" to not be pregnant anymore than you have a right to not be hit by a bus while jaywalking or not have cancer despite smoking. As a teen, you do not have a right to consequence free sex independent of whatever your parents' opinion on the matter is. You have a constitutional right (as an adult) to procure items that prevent or end pregnancy if they are available to you, you can pay the requisite price for them, and they are within the bounds of local regulation. In other words abortion and birth control are like porn. And this is appropriate in a country as religiously pluralistic as this one.

Arguing about socialized healthcare still doesn't answer the question about birth control and abortions especially with teens. I've said before I'm not particularly opposed to socialized healthcare (with a lot of caveats including how much it will cost relative to what we are already paying). But you could have the Hyde Amendment in a socialized healthcare system just as easily as you could in the one we have.

There are several hang up points here.

1) Birth control is overwhelmingly supported by most people and abortion is not. Therefore birth control being covered by national insurance programs is not a big deal and probably would not be in some hypothetical socialized system either. This makes debates about birth control orthogonal to ones about abortion when considered independently of the insurance coverage question.

2) Parents in the US have a very strong expectation of being able to direct their kids education if they want and if they have the means to do so. (Again, you are not entitled by right to procuring whatever education you want for your kid but if you can pay for it, you can homeschool them or send them to a private school teaching pretty much whatever you want).

3) Along with that is the expectation that minors do not possess the right to direct their own lives independent of whatever the adults who have responsibility for them want or expect. (And this cuts both ways, fights about sex ed, the history of race, and a thousand other things really boil down to whether conservatives or progressives get to force schools to teach the things they want. Neither really gives a shit about "the science" or "the truth." It's also a power struggle over which group should have the power to surreptitiously disrupt the wishes of parents from the "wrong" faction be it by handing out condoms at school, or teaching intelligent design in science class or whatever).

So we have two really sticky impasses at the heart of this debate independent of the insurance coverage question that would persist even with universal socialized healthcare.

Do you have a *right* to free abortions on demand paid for by public money?
Do institutions have a right to circumvent the desires of parents by giving teens the thing they need to engage in consequence (at least regarding pregnancy) free sex?

[Sinekein]

So the least evil position to me is to reject it wholesale, unless the mother is in mortal danger and/or the fetus is nonviable/severely malformed. Then from there, it is in the best interest of the people that universal Baby Moses laws are implemented, good orphanages are built, fostering is encouraged (though not rewarded), and so on. We've spent trillions rewarding war profiteering and healthcare for the very sick, we can spare some to encourage life to continue too. That the current America is too sickly to enact these measures, or raise children in functional homes as a whole, is a secondary concern to minimizing unnecessary death, then suffering, then crappy lives, in that order.

I am fundamentally pro-abortion, because 1. I won't ever have to think about it for obvious biological reasons, so it's hard for me to say that other people shouldn't do it, and 2. If you start saying you are "pro-life", then even the caveats you added - danger for the mother, big medical issues for the fetus - become inconsistent. If you consider that a fetus is a life, then why should it be less important than that of a mother? Are you ranking them? That also means that abortions following rapes and/or incest - which, while thankfully rare, do exist - also have to go to term. 9 months of a woman having a reminder of her sexual assault growing inside her, must be absolutely fantastic.

But at least your position has the consistency of wishing for a better care/adoption system for unwanted babies. Which, from what I gather, is shared by a negligible minority of pro-lifers, who aren't the biggest supporters of healthcare plans or anything seen as "socialist" - because, obviously, babies can't pay for their own care, so someone else - the general populatio - has to do it, which means taxes.

And that's not even going into pro-lifers' stances on adoptions by gay or lesbian couples.

So I disagree with you, but your position is sound. Sadly, I don't think you are in a majority, at all. I am certain the debate would be much less violent if pro-lifers also were huge on state help for single mothers or orphans.

Also really TMI, but it is also completely possible to regulate your fertility by tracking your own ovulation with a thermometer and needing 0 hormonal birth control at all. This is not "the rhythm method." It is precise and tailored to what your specific body is doing. My sister has used it for 20 years to plan 3 pregnancies and avoid others because she doesn't like the idea of dosing herself with hormones.

Most women are much, much more ignorant about how ovulation cycles work than they are are about how sex works. I would be *totally* for teaching girls this in school. Knowing little or nothing about your own fertility cycles both drastically increases your chance of getting accidentally pregnant and makes it much harder for you to become pregnant if you want to do so.

One fundamental issue here is that men are even less educated than women on those issues - and as you mention, all women aren't properly educated to begin with - but there is absolutely zero incentive for them to improve so far, since there are no consequences whatsoever for them in situations where women think about getting an abortion.

As long as it remains that way, there will be a problem. But it's not much more ethical to make DNA paternity tests mandatory so that whoever was also responsible for the pregnancy has to share the burden, if only financially - honestly, I wouldn't mind much. Or more accurately, it raises other issues.

I would add that there has been scientific articles that studied the consequences of unwanted pregnancies, and spoiler alert: it's not positive for either the mother or the baby, and tends to lead to more people that will be more detrimental than beneficial to society as a whole later on.

Arguing about socialized healthcare still doesn't answer the question about birth control and abortions especially with teens. I've said before I'm not particularly opposed to socialized healthcare (with a lot of caveats including how much it will cost relative to what we are already paying). But you could have the Hyde Amendment in a socialized healthcare system just as easily as you could in the one we have.

Didn't you mention "paying for the morning after pill" just before? Because that's what socialized healthcare does. And it makes it much more available, if only people will more easily go get something for free, than they would go pay for it. Especially if it's anonymous - you can get it for free in high school in France, for example, and no one but the high school's nurse ever knows about it.

With socialized healthcare, there is no such thing as an "abortion clinic". So no demonstrators trying to shame women into not getting the abortion they sought. You can have an abortion in every clinic with an OBGYN, so good luck planning to target them all.

[Ragabul]

See my update to my previous post I was adding as you were also writing this post. It pretty much addresses the last point you are making.

It is the case that probably in some situation in which enough of the public in the USA supports socialized healthcare to make this a viable reality that the entire electorate has probably swung left enough to make it no longer a question whether that system should provide abortions and anonymous birth control for teens.

I'm talking about how the USA is right now and how even if we had a socialized system *right now* it would not address the root of what's driving the abortion issue.

Again, we have state programs paying for birth control *right now* and pretty much nobody is throwing a fit about it. But we also have the Hyde Amendment which forbids government money being used for specifically abortions. In as much as "defund X" arguments have steam it's usually because people falsely believe that federal money is being used for abortions or correctly believe federal money indirectly assists institutions like Planned Parenthood in providing abortions because a notable chunk of their standard services are on the government dime.

The Texas law did 0 to target standard birth control. Nobody (that isn't exceedingly fringe) is yelling about defunding Medicaid because it provides birth control.

This is my point. There are two separate issues here that currently overlap in consequentialist terms but they are still discrete. If I could press the magical "make the USA have socialized healthcare tomorrow" button, it would not make this debate go away because "Should poor women get state sponsored essential healthcare" and "should abortion qualify as essential healthcare" are not the same question.

*Edit* If the socialized healthcare drastically lowered the number of women getting abortions because so many now got cheap birth control who did not before that might short circuit the debate, but on a quick inspection of global abortion rates, there does not appear to a be a dramatic reduction in countries with socialized healthcare relative to those who don't have where you can unambiguously credit socialized healthcare as the main thing making the difference. "Is this country still fairly devoutly religious or socially conservative" and/or "how many poor people are there" and/or "is the entire healthcare system (either public or private) really terrible" seem to have a bigger impact.

The two types of countries that have the lowest rates tend to fall into two categories.

1) Quite affluent in per capita terms, very generous social safety net, very secular, highly educated population

2) Pretty middling or poor in per capita terms, very hit and miss social safety net, quite religious, lots of poorly educated people

The ones with the absolute highest rates seem to be "lots of poor people but also pretty secular."

The middling ones are obviously middling on all of these categories.

*Edit* Sorry for eternal stealth edits. I just keep thinking about something long after I post it and/or reading about it and finding new relevant details.

Another map indicating where abortion is and is not legal to screen out noise based on regulations: https://worldpopulationreview.com/count ... is-illegal

[Sinekein]

Except that if you start to consider that the morning after pill is "birth control" and different from "abortion", then once again, where do you draw the line? Fecundation might already have happened when the pill is ingested, and the pill is equally likely to eliminate two gametes than it is an egg cell, depending on how much time there was between the act and you taking the pill. If the woman was ovulating, it is extremely likely that there was a fecundation already, even if only a couple hours happen between intercourse and pill.

And if it was indeed an egg cell, it is morally identical to an abortion: if you had done nothing, the egg cell would have grown into a human being. Or several. So if you want to be consistent, either you support abortion rights up until a time limit that can vary and is a topic in itself, or you oppose it as soon as a fecundation occurs, but you can't say that the two are different.

The only difference between a morning after pill and an "abortion" is that with the MAP you are not 100% sure that you are having an abortion. But you are basically doing the same thing biologically speaking: interrupting a pregnancy.

[Mazder]

Plan B is not a chemical abortificant. If you are 3 weeks pregnant and take it, it won't work. It specifically prevents pregnancy within about a 48 hour window of unprotected sex.

Ah, no, I don't think that's available here.

(after a quick google) Actually it is for £25-£35 in most pharmacies, if you can not be seen by a doctor and get it for free, which is also rather common apparently according to NHS website.

And there is no notable difference in availability of preventative health services for adults that are not explainable by almost entirely economic factors. It is not harder to get birth control in Texas than California or West Virginia than New York City outside of generic problems like divergences in insurance coverage and how far away you are from cheap clinics. The thing keeping somebody in West Podunk from getting pills is not abstinence only education. It's being 50 miles away from the nearest clinic and having no health insurance. And this is equally true of somebody in the hinterlands of California, New York, Texas, or West Virginia. There are differences there in state insurance coverage levels that explain pretty much all divergence for people in similar circumstances.

Yeah, nah, that is a partial problem. Partial in a sense that if it were only clinics handing out contraceptives then lack of access would be a problem. But seeing as anyone can get a pack of 36 condoms for $15 then they rightly should be covered in theory. Unless they're going at it like rabbits, in which case there might be more of a societal issue at play.

The crux of the issue has never really evolved so much around what people are taught as what is expected to be provided to them. I could get into a whole other rat's nest of a post about public schools, but it's mostly a myth that you can fix various societal ills by teaching people about it in schools. Do people seriously believe that there are notable numbers of students who are sufficiently non devout to reject sexual abstinence but yet so wholly ignorant of how sex works that they end up accidentally pregnant? The issue is not what gets taught in schools but how much leeway teens have to procure items that allow them to have sex sans pregnancy independent of what their parents may want.

This is at the crux of the issue in the USA. In this country you do not have a "right" to not be pregnant anymore than you have a right to not be hit by a bus while jaywalking or not have cancer despite smoking. As a teen, you do not have a right to consequence free sex independent of whatever your parents' opinion on the matter is. You have a constitutional right (as an adult) to procure items that prevent or end pregnancy if they are available to you, you can pay the requisite price for them, and they are within the bounds of local regulation. In other words abortion and birth control are like porn. And this is appropriate in a country as religiously pluralistic as this one.

So despite knowing that teens become sexually active much sooner than the law says they are/"should" be the answer is to limit the availability of contraceptives because they don't have the right to them?

Personally to me it's a fundamental human right to access to medical care as standard, so that utterly baffles me that there is something known and the thought is "well they don't have the right to it so we'll just keep it going".

Especially in an age where access to information, including porn and shit like that despite the best efforts of those in government (despite playing catch-up with those learning how to use technology at the best time of their lives to learn it) and that access to info spurs on the development of teens/young adults.

Arguing about socialized healthcare still doesn't answer the question about birth control and abortions especially with teens. I've said before I'm not particularly opposed to socialized healthcare (with a lot of caveats including how much it will cost relative to what we are already paying). But you could have the Hyde Amendment in a socialized healthcare system just as easily as you could in the one we have.

There are several hang up points here.

1) Birth control is overwhelmingly supported by most people and abortion is not. Therefore birth control being covered by national insurance programs is not a big deal and probably would not be in some hypothetical socialized system either. This makes debates about birth control orthogonal to ones about abortion when considered independently of the insurance coverage question.

If contraceptives, sexual health clinics (this means STI treatments, family planning, pregnancy screenings, safe sex and honestly a little bit of life advice included) and access are made free at the point of use then the use of abortions will probably go down, especially if used as a contraceptive.
Also if the teens are able to get screened in a safer environment that was free and open then they can get better advice in case they had things wrong.
Hell, your example of menstrual cycle teachings would be included in that.

2) Parents in the US have a very strong expectation of being able to direct their kids education if they want and if they have the means to do so. (Again, you are not entitled by right to procuring whatever education you want for your kid but if you can pay for it, you can homeschool them or send them to a private school teaching pretty much whatever you want).

That needs to change.
Dumbfuck parents teaching their kids what they like is 100% crap and needs to be changed. I know that's a much harder thing to fix but it's a huge problem with allowing teens to actually get advice if they don't know any better.

3) Along with that is the expectation that minors do not possess the right to direct their own lives independent of whatever the adults who have responsibility for them want or expect. (And this cuts both ways, fights about sex ed, the history of race, and a thousand other things really boil down to whether conservatives or progressives get to force schools to teach the things they want. Neither really gives a shit about "the science" or "the truth." It's also a power struggle over which group should have the power to surreptitiously disrupt the wishes of parents from the "wrong" faction be it by handing out condoms at school, or teaching intelligent design in science class or whatever).

So we have two really sticky impasses at the heart of this debate independent of the insurance coverage question that would persist even with universal socialized healthcare.

And that's also a thing that needs to change.
If, say, a 17 year old wishes to practice safe sex but their live is not expected to posess the right to do so then shit's fucked up 100%.
And, yeah, most times when we hear about things being allowed/not allowed in schools it's usually the conservatives/religious right getting into a fucking pissy fit.
Can't teach evolution because my bible says that's wrong.
My bible says we have to go forth and multiply so we better be teaching about that and not how to stop that.
That kind of rhetoric.

Do you have a *right* to free abortions on demand paid for by public money?

Yes.
We do it all the time here. The way you get to not having abortions being used as a contraceptive and as a last ditch option is you make all other forms of contraceptive and consultation free as well.
The USA has the largest economy in the world and can easily, easily afford it if it so wanted to.

Do institutions have a right to circumvent the desires of parents by giving teens the thing they need to engage in consequence (at least regarding pregnancy) free sex?

If you view forcing a child to carry a child as child abuse then, yes. CPS, the child's doctor and the like should intervene and determine if the child in this instance is abused by way of being forced to carry the child to term way too soon.
If anything below 18 is a child then forcing a child to remain pregnant is 100% abusive.

If a kid was taking crack and the parents don't want to have the child get clean because of their stupid ideas/wishes does CPS and doctors not get involved to do something about it?

I am fundamentally pro-abortion, because 1. I won't ever have to think about it for obvious biological reasons, so it's hard for me to say that other people shouldn't do it, and 2. If you start saying you are "pro-life", then even the caveats you added - danger for the mother, big medical issues for the fetus - become inconsistent. If you consider that a fetus is a life, then why should it be less important than that of a mother? Are you ranking them? That also means that abortions following rapes and/or incest - which, while thankfully rare, do exist - also have to go to term. 9 months of a woman having a reminder of her sexual assault growing inside her, must be absolutely fantastic.

And even then we get into the realms of parasite vs foetus.
To someone who is a victim of sexual assault one can make that argument that they could see the pregnancy as more of an infection/violation. So when confronted with the "life begins at heartbeat" then does that mean a parasite has the right to remain in a woman's body if she does not wish it there?
"But a parasite could kill a woman, but a baby can't." Yeah, but depression linked to having to live through the trauma of carrying the baby of your abuser to term can.

Sorry that was kinda dark but I felt that was an argument that could also be made.
(also hi, good to see ya Sine, hope you're keeping well)

Didn't you mention "paying for the morning after pill" just before? Because that's what socialized healthcare does. And it makes it much more available, if only people will more easily go get something for free, than they would go pay for it. Especially if it's anonymous - you can get it for free in high school in France, for example, and no one but the high school's nurse ever knows about it.

With socialized healthcare, there is no such thing as an "abortion clinic". So no demonstrators trying to shame women into not getting the abortion they sought. You can have an abortion in every clinic with an OBGYN, so good luck planning to target them all.

Ah really? I didn't know that you could do that in France.
I think the UK has done away with actual on site nurses, etc, due to potential paedophilia fears. That and slashing the NHS.
If they weren't happening I hope the UK does something similar.

[Ragabul]

Except that if you start to consider that the morning after pill is "birth control" and different from "abortion", then once again, where do you draw the line? Fecundation might already have happened when the pill is ingested, and the pill is equally likely to eliminate two gametes than it is an egg cell, depending on how much time there was between the act and you taking the pill. If the woman was ovulating, it is extremely likely that there was a fecundation already, even if only a couple hours happen between intercourse and pill.

And if it was indeed an egg cell, it is morally identical to an abortion: if you had done nothing, the egg cell would have grown into a human being. Or several. So if you want to be consistent, either you support abortion rights up until a time limit that can vary and is a topic in itself, or you oppose it as soon as a fecundation occurs, but you can't say that the two are different.

The only difference between a morning after pill and an "abortion" is that with the MAP you are not 100% sure that you are having an abortion. But you are basically doing the same thing biologically speaking: interrupting a pregnancy.

Sure, which is precisely why there was a supreme court fight over whether or not insurers could be forced to provide Plan B on insurance policies despite having moral objections to them and the Supreme Court allowed an exemption for them. Last I looked this up, there were a couple of weird businesses that did so (Hobby Lobby which is an arts and crafts store chain) and then a bunch of non profits like Catholic hospitals and various religious charities. The overwhelmingly bulk of employers are unambiguously secular and aren't even trying to pretend otherwise and are quite happy to provide coverage for a $40 thing that means their insurance doesn't have to pay thousands for maternity care and in which an employee gets multiple weeks of legally mandated leave. Governmental entities *cannot* exempt themselves because of the seperation of church and state, even the municipal government of West Podunk, Alabama.

There's also the further complication that it's over the counter and not particularly expensive. I don't know how socialized healthcare works on this front. Can you show up at the NHS office and get free Tylenol and Pepto Bismol to keep in your medicine cabinet at home? Or Band-aids or basic antibiotic cream?

This doesn't really dispute what I'm saying. There are a handful of extreme pro-lifers for whom *anything* that disrupts pregnancy is murder. There is a huge group of people who get increasingly uncomfortable with things that end pregnancy the farther into pregnancy you go. Most people are fine with Plan B, mostly fine with chemical abortificants that work at later dates, really uncomfortable with "partial birth abortion," and appalled by the idea of killing a preemie infant born live during some hypothetical botched abortion.

When I say Plan B is not an abortificant I am resorting to the popular opinion on the topic, yes. I am also actually using language the pro-choice movement here uses to defend it. You've got 3 options here. The extremists on either side are 100% correct morally and scientifically or you come up with a compromise in the middle based on muddy definitions and majority public opinion. It *is* ambiguous. It *is* muddy. Hence, why the stickines of the impasse.

@ Mazder

Also, I'm not arguing from a position of when life begins or whether abortion is murder or not. I'm arguing from the position of "what is the thing most likely to get US politics out of the issue vampire that is the abortion debate that isn't 'completely remake the US healthcare system' and/or 'get 40% of the US population who is devoutly religious to suddenly adopt secular positions on sex and reproduction.'"

[Sinekein]

There's also the further complication that it's over the counter and not particularly expensive. I don't know how socialized healthcare works on this front. Can you show up at the NHS office and get free Tylenol and Pepto Bismol to keep in your medicine cabinet at home? Or Band-aids or basic antibiotic cream?

Chemical abortions in the first weeks of the pregnancy are similar, the difference being that you need to see a doctor first to get your prescription. Once it's done, you can get the drugs for free.

Tylenol, band-aids, etc... are only free if a doctor prescribes them. If you don't see a doctor first, you have to pay. It's the same thing for most drugs really.

This doesn't really dispute what I'm saying. There are a handful of extreme pro-lifers for whom *anything* that disrupts pregnancy is murder. There is a huge group of people who get increasingly uncomfortable with things that end pregnancy the farther into pregnancy you go. Most people are fine with Plan B, mostly fine with chemical abortificants that work at later dates, really uncomfortable with "partial birth abortion," and appalled by the idea of killing a preemie infant born live during some hypothetical botched abortion.

True, but most "late abortions" have less to do with a woman suddenly saying "eh, no, actually I don't want it" and more to do with wasting a lot of time in the process. The simpler getting an abortion is, the earlier they happen. When you have to see two different doctors and then get an appointment in a hospital, then you can easily go over 10 or 12 weeks of amenorrhea if you are also working, for example. There is also the matter of the time women need to realize they are pregnant - sometimes it's very early, sometimes it can be well into the second month.

So making abortions more available is likely to reduce the number of those that make people "uncomfortable".

As for it shocking "religious people", well, either you are a secular country, or you're not. The US would really benefit from cutting ties between religion and politics, because from the outside it looks like it is making way more harm than good.

[Mazder]

There's also the further complication that it's over the counter and not particularly expensive. I don't know how socialized healthcare works on this front. Can you show up at the NHS office and get free Tylenol and Pepto Bismol to keep in your medicine cabinet at home? Or Band-aids or basic antibiotic cream?

Chemical abortions in the first weeks of the pregnancy are similar, the difference being that you need to see a doctor first to get your prescription. Once it's done, you can get the drugs for free.

Tylenol, band-aids, etc... are only free if a doctor prescribes them. If you don't see a doctor first, you have to pay. It's the same thing for most drugs really.

While yes, that is the case there are also non-name brand ones (and TBH most of the drugs are called by drug names not brand names) which do the exact same job and are cheaper. They're usually put under pharmacy names just for selling purposes.
Literally the same dose.

So Acetaminophen and Paracetamol are the same drug, called different things because of who makes it. In the USA Acetaminophen is usually know as Tylenol. In the UK Paracetamol is known as Paracetamol. We do have brands of Paracetamol, they are Disprol, Hedex, Anadin, Medinol and Panadol and I had to google that as I only knew of Panadol and Anadin and that one is more expensive for the name and have literally seen Paracetamol everywhere.

I can literally go to my work (which is a cheap shop and not even a pharmacy) and get a pack of 16 tablets for 29p (40 cents). Because we're not a medical store we can only limit a sale of 2 packs per transaction group. The Boots Pharmacy round the corner I can pay double for a double pack and buy at least 2.

As for it shocking "religious people", well, either you are a secular country, or you're not. The US would really benefit from cutting ties between religion and politics, because from the outside it looks like it is making way more harm than good.

This.
The UK is a "Christian Nation" on paper but we've been able to perform this service very easily because of disassociating the two. Despite having people like the Archbishop of Canterbury being able to be placed in the House of Lords we still have been able to keep abortions as a human right.

@ Mazder

Also, I'm not arguing from a position of when life begins or whether abortion is murder or not. I'm arguing from the position of "what is the thing most likely to get US politics out of the issue vampire that is the abortion debate that isn't 'completely remake the US healthcare system' and/or 'get 40% of the US population who is devoutly religious to suddenly adopt secular positions on sex and reproduction.'"

Honestly trying to do it without one of those options just isn't going to happen.
The issue of abortion being vampiric is nothing compared to the US medical system in of itself.
The only way to fix that is to completely overhaul that, but that would need to be done over a course of decades to fully unentangle the bullshit the pharmaceutical lobbying has wrought on your country.
Not to mention the cultural differences of personal freedom vs the freedom of everyone.

For being called the United States of America the population is certainly not United in existence.

And, honestly, secular views on sex and reproduction are just better in my opinion.
Every religion that encourages procreation is done under that guise of outbreeding the heretics, so that you can have more people to fight for that religion when the time comes because the two concepts are roped together in my eyes.

[Ragabul]

I don't expect most people to get it but this was extremely poignant for me: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Does a better job than most things at explaining that bizarre angst that is the Southern complex of loving the South and understanding what the South has been, of simultaneously knowing you deserved to lose and still finding losing painful.

Alternately, another excellent description in the short story by William Faulkner A Rose for Emily

► Show Spoiler

Being Southern is like sleeping with a corpse that you love

*Edit* He is wrong about Robert E. Lee though. Lee was not opposed to slavery.

And in case this is not agonizingly clear I am not supporting the Lost Cause or even saying Confederate statues should remain. I'm talking about a cultural mood. Nothing else.

*Edit* And because this made me go down a weird pensive rabbit hole, here's another description of the Southern complex from a singularly unexpected source: Faulkner and Desegregation by James Baldwin

[Vol]

I understand it, despite not being a Southerner, or having any real roots. So the specific case of the Confederacy doesn't resonate with me so much as what it all symbolizes. Because all I've ever had is that general symbol of America, no specific place or people. It's easy to get overwhelmed when I try and "contain" all that's happened, and imagine what will happen, and how much has been lost. Not poetic enough to put it into words. All I have is symbolism.

The contents of the nu-time capsule do a better job of expressing the shallow meanness of the Vandals than anything I could say. And I don't know how to possibly explain why a statue I've never seen, of a man everyone agrees fought for the bad guys, in a city that doesn't want it there, is so damn important to keep.

[Alienmorph]

That does remind me quite a bit of all the fools around here who are still nostalgic of the fascist regime. Mostly because they believe they'd be among the priviledged fews who'd live the high life, and not part of the folks being worked to death in the factories, or being sent to die fighting useless wars in Africa.

Guess people would rather cling to laust causes than to nothing at all.

[Vol]

Funnily enough, there's a guy on Twitter I keep seeing who is exactly that. He's an otherwise normal, proud Italian American, posts his daily espresso, scenic shots of Italy and pretty girls, and then every now and then, randomly drops a post longing for Il Duce.

Much like the doughy, first world communists who imagine they'll be apparatchik, and that their urban man-child lifestyles will only get better, it reads almost like a mystery cult. The difference being the communists have fully bought into rationalism, they think that man can engineer a perfect society with enough reason and force. The fascists instead look to the past and grasp for what's appeared to work. Both are willing to look past the atrocities, because how things are and how they should be matters more. Surely there won't be another Holodomor/Holocaust.

Though for Europeans in particular, I imagine having had kings and emperors within living memory, and having gotten rid of them after the dual traumas of two world wars, there's a living ancestral memory of how things could be better than whatever you want to call what they have now.

[TTTX]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_xfsODcB-4&ab

Well if you are looking forward to the KotoR remake, one of the the people working on the game is one of those hardcore SJW woke activist, so expect the usual fighting and name calling.

[Ragabul]

In the genre of waste of time clickbait that is self-satirizing: Some place in Canada is having second thoughts about burning a bunch of books offensive to Amerindians because as it turns out the person calling for the book burning is maybe as native as Elizabeth Warren.

We can't have just any old uncredentialed poser burn books! What is the world coming to?!

[Alienmorph]

Well if you are looking forward to the KotoR remake, one of the the people working on the game is one of those hardcore SJW woke activist, so expect the usual fighting and name calling.

Literally already started. But that's what you get when you hire a former Mary Sue "journalist".

[Sinekein]

Though for Europeans in particular, I imagine having had kings and emperors within living memory, and having gotten rid of them after the dual traumas of two world wars, there's a living ancestral memory of how things could be better than whatever you want to call what they have now.

Worse. I think you mean that the memories of XXth century history remind us of how much worse the situation could be than what we currently have.

[Sinekein]

Well if you are looking forward to the KotoR remake, one of the the people working on the game is one of those hardcore SJW woke activist, so expect the usual fighting and name calling.

Literally already started. But that's what you get when you hire a former Mary Sue "journalist".

KotoR is literally the first game that raised my interest in 2021, and about which I read several news articles.

I had to come here to hear about that "controversy". That was mentioned nowhere else in the articles I read about.

So, kudos for making sure Clownfish TV can keep making money out of the Twitter wars it is engineering I guess. Don't forget to always share and retweet and get indignant whenever you can cryptically interpret a message as maybe a small change that might or might not be woke in the remake of a game that never raised any issue among woke fans to begin with, coming from a company that is known for having been rather woke ten years before the term was even coined.

[Alienmorph]

So, kudos for making sure Clownfish TV can keep making money out of the Twitter wars it is engineering I guess.

lol, like Twitter needs Clowfish TV's help to be a toxic cesspool that fights over everything.

Haven't even watched their video, thei're not exactly the only source on information on the Internet. Still, feel free to check yourself, former Mary Sue writer Sam Maggs is working on the game, and the producer is already harping on about how it's gonna be a "complete remake and reimagining" of the original, look up their Twitter.

[Vol]

Worse. I think you mean that the memories of XXth century history remind us of how much worse the situation could be than what we currently have.

As in, there exist living Europeans, or their immediate descendants, who have fond memories of their respective monarchies. Whether they were better or worse is really a matter of what you prioritize in a government.

Looking it up, apparently Italy had an outright referendum after WW2. There was a king crowned for a month during this period, and the vote was 54% to 45% for a republic, split between rural and urban just like always. 1946, so a good number of people alive from then still no less.

lol, like Twitter needs Clowfish TV's help to be a toxic cesspool that fights over everything.

Haven't even watched their video, thei're not exactly the only source on information on the Internet. Still, feel free to check yourself, former Mary Sue writer Sam Maggs is working on the game, and the producer is already harping on about how it's gonna be a "complete remake and reimagining" of the original, look up their Twitter.

I mean, we can reasonably assume that they won't change _much_. Probably a re-contextualizing of scenes like Bastia being mind-broken, covering up what little cheesecake there was, and adding crappy new dialogue. It will be annoying and obnoxious, but fundamentally still KOTOR. In no small part because an angry weirdo Mary Sue writer is not capable of construction, only deconstruction, so she will not be given carte blanche to do anything but tweak what's there.

I'm reminded of the old Simpsons episode where after Marge and her fellow house wives go on a morality spree targeting cartoons, the David is set to be shown at a local museum, and Marge is confused why all her friends were upset she didn't think the fig leaf should be on his groin.

[Alienmorph]

I mean, we can reasonably assume that they won't change _much_. Probably a re-contextualizing of scenes like Bastia being mind-broken, covering up what little cheesecake there was, and adding crappy new dialogue. It will be annoying and obnoxious, but fundamentally still KOTOR. In no small part because an angry weirdo Mary Sue writer is not capable of construction, only deconstruction, so she will not be given carte blanche to do anything but tweak what's there.

I'll admit I tend to think of the worst whenever I ear talks about "reimagining" or "updating for a moder audience" something. Add to that now the fact the writer now attached to the project is a keyboard activist who thinks SW: Last Jedi is a masterpiece and that the only reason to dislike it and its main character is sexism and... yeah. I haz worries.

I'm reminded of the old Simpsons episode where after Marge and her fellow house wives go on a morality spree targeting cartoons, the David is set to be shown at a local museum, and Marge is confused why all her friends were upset she didn't think the fig leaf should be on his groin.

That episode was so damn prophetic. It was literally current year's culture war minus the social medias.

Weirdos make a lot of noises around something they deem offensive and troublesome.
Big corporation gets scared and listen to them instead than to their public.
The "problematic" thing gets censored and sanitized into oblivion.
Public flees, while the weirdos celebrate their victory.
Big corporation loses tons of money as they lost the bulk of their audience and the weirdos never planned to support them even after the "fix".
Weirdos move on to another target, and get rid of anyone who disagree on the chosen objective.

Do it with Twitter instead than with snail mail like in the Simpsons, and it's pretty much one-for-one the same thing.

[TTTX]

I'll admit I tend to think of the worst whenever I ear talks about "reimagining" or "updating for a moder audience" something. Add to that now the fact the writer now attached to the project is a keyboard activist who thinks SW: Last Jedi is a masterpiece and that the only reason to dislike it and its main character is sexism and... yeah. I haz worries.

and for good reason I say, considering we have seen these kind things before.

of course we could be wrong and she is on a tight leash or can be professional enough she isn't going to let her political views influence her work (in a bad way obviously), but well it's 2021 and people still hide behind the woke to hide either very crappy or at best okay work.

[Sinekein]

lol, like Twitter needs Clowfish TV's help to be a toxic cesspool that fights over everything.

Haven't even watched their video, thei're not exactly the only source on information on the Internet. Still, feel free to check yourself, former Mary Sue writer Sam Maggs is working on the game, and the producer is already harping on about how it's gonna be a "complete remake and reimagining" of the original, look up their Twitter.

Not saying that.

But to get a dumb Twitter war, you need two participants.

The fact that you agree with one more than the other does not change the fact that both profit greatly from people helping them to blow minor details into gigantic shitstorms.

I mean, take a serious, hard look at the situation here:
- the game is still in early development, it's not even certain the story has been (re)written in its entirety yet (I would even say it's highly unlikely it has)
- the former TMS writer is working for this team, fine. Which means that, like every single person working on a future video game, she has to respect a ton of NDAs, so she will not say anything significant in interviews - else she will lose her job. "Complete remake and reimagining" can just mean anything you want it to mean. It's random PR any video game studio uses all the time, no matter whether they just polish the original game or actually rework it from the ground up.
- she is one person writing on the team. She is not this game's Casey Hudson. She isn't even this game's Mac Walters.

Any video trying to analyze her actual contribution right now to the game is just hot fucking air. It has zero substance. When you share it on the net, you just help make this large bag of nothingness somewhat relevant, and you promote the kind of empty discussions born from absolutely fucking nothing that matters.

So you can't both say that Clownfish TV is right to be indignant, and that Twitter is a toxic cesspool. If you truly believe one of these statements, then you have to oppose the other.

[Sinekein]

As in, there exist living Europeans, or their immediate descendants, who have fond memories of their respective monarchies. Whether they were better or worse is really a matter of what you prioritize in a government.

Looking it up, apparently Italy had an outright referendum after WW2. There was a king crowned for a month during this period, and the vote was 54% to 45% for a republic, split between rural and urban just like always. 1946, so a good number of people alive from then still no less.

Monarchists are almost exclusively old blood, wealthy or not. You have way more fans of various forms of fascism than you do monarchies. Especially in Germany (last Emperor in 1918) or France (last King in 1848, and Emperor in 1870). Also, a ton of EU countries are still monarchies, but constitutional ones where the royal family has a strictly honorific title, and those, as far as I know, absolutely do not wish for their monarchs to get more power again. Mostly because in the XXIst century, people seem to be aware than anyone, no matter how nice or smart or skilled or politically aware, can breed a fucking evil idiot. So inheriting power is something that is basically out of the window.

For the record, only the King of Belgians still has a modicum of power because he is one of the few things French-Belgians, Dutch-Belgians and German-Belgians have in common. But it's really a modicum, the prime minister is leading the country.

That leaves the various shades of the far-right. But in France, actual supporters of fascism or a military leader are only a tiny fraction of the far-right vote. Which is rather diverse.
- You have the hardcore Christians, who might be monarchists or fascists (and often work in the military) - but are not very numerous
- You have the impoverished blue-collars, with high rates of unemployment, especially in the North and Northeast which are former industrial areas, but they are not supremacists (or very religious): many of them supported the Communist Party a couple decades ago when there were more jobs near their homes
- You have the descendants of people born in French colonies, especially in Algeria, who are very much racist against Arabs (and sometimes Africans too), but don't necessarily support a military state: they just still hold resentment from the time they were kicked from what was their home (1954-1962, during the Algeria Independance War).
- You have nostalgics of the nazi regime, but they are over 90 now (WW2 started 82 years ago, remember)
- You have actual white supremacists, the kind who shave their heads, get nazi memorabilia and/or nazi tattoos, and who like nothing more than going out and punching leftists or foreigners. But while they are very politically active...there aren't many of them either (thank fuck)

So no, you won't get many people being fond of fascism. That might look like it coming from a country that -never- knew what an actual dictatorship is, but it really isn't. Even on the far-right many people are complaining about some of the most authoritarian decisions from our current (center-right) government.

Also, regarding the opinion of people in 1946, have a look at this:

[Alienmorph]

So you can't both say that Clownfish TV is right to be indignant, and that Twitter is a toxic cesspool. If you truly believe one of these statements, then you have to oppose the other.

You start from the flawled premise that, just because TTX posted the video reporting the news either he or myself are buying into it because Clowfish TV is talking about it. That is not the case, it's information freely avaiable on multiple sources, not just them. And I'm not saying "omg it's already ruined" either. Just that things aren't off to a promising start.

Also, Clownfish has proven to have reliable sources multiple times, see for example the whole debacle with Kevin Smith and MOTU Revelations where they got wind of what was gonna be happening with that months ahead of everyone else. I don't take anyone's word verbatum as a rule of thumb, but I'd be willing to at least give them the benefit of the doubt even if it were just them to report on a news.

Also also, sure, there's people capitalizing on outrage on both sides, the only people who benefited from this whole Culture War nonesense have been news outlets, really. But how come that I never see you arguing against mainstream outlets? You're not so naive that you think only the indipendent media can run on outrage, are you?

[TTTX]

Also also, sure, there's people capitalizing on outrage on both sides, the only people who benefited from this whole Culture War nonesense have been news outlets, really.

well the rich do too considering that the Woke culture is strongest there and keeps the people from actually focusing on some real problems, like heath care and free higher education, etc, because the rich don't want to pay to have poor people get some free medical help or get a free college education.

after all as long as the people are divided on stuff the major rich people don't care about, so the rich can do some other shady stuff to give themselves more money, like those high bonuses we have seen Bobby of Activision give himself.

[Alienmorph]

True, true. The good old Divide and Conquer. High risk, but as high reward as it has ever been.

[Sinekein]

You start from the flawled premise that, just because TTX posted the video reporting the news either he or myself are buying into it because Clowfish TV is talking about it. That is not the case, it's information freely avaiable on multiple sources, not just them. And I'm not saying "omg it's already ruined" either. Just that things aren't off to a promising start.

If it was actually "information", the video would be 12 seconds long, and would say "Former TMS writer has been hired by Aspyr to work on KOTOR".

Since it's way longer than 12 seconds, it means it's not information, it's an opinion piece that builds the foundation for future outrage based on the reputation of a writer. They're probably already preparing the "I told you so" video when the game will be released - no matter how good it actually is, because if they can talk for several minutes about a one-line news, I'm sure a single minor detail in the released product that can be read through the "wokebad" prism will be enough for another angry video.

Yes, a writer being hired to work on a game is "information" - albeit an extremely minor one. Everything beyond that is speculation and opinion, and contributes fuck all to any civilized debate.

But, I mean, it works. You already state, based on the hiring of ONE PERSON, that "things aren't off to a promising start". Their job is done: they already have convinced some people to share their view.

Also, Clownfish has proven to have reliable sources multiple times, see for example the whole debacle with Kevin Smith and MOTU Revelations where they got wind of what was gonna be happening with that months ahead of everyone else. I don't take anyone's word verbatum as a rule of thumb, but I'd be willing to at least give them the benefit of the doubt even if it were just them to report on a news.

Okay, so, I went to their channel, sorted their videos by "Latest", and I had to go back 9 days to find one where they're talking out of their ass and making a completely wrong prediction (and that's just the one I know is wrong, maybe other, more recent ones are also completely full of BS):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xunvc1u_-qM

They predicted a global grossing of 90M, and it's roughly double that right now (and still in theaters). That's very wrong. Or at least, that is sharing very wrong predictions.

So, uh, yeah, when you keep speculating, sometimes you'll be right. Basic math, Broken clock, etc.

Also also, sure, there's people capitalizing on outrage on both sides, the only people who benefited from this whole Culture War nonesense have been news outlets, really. But how come that I never see you arguing against mainstream outlets? You're not so naive that you think only the indipendent media can run on outrage, are you?

Well that one if fucking easy: I don't care about critics, I don't care about marketing campaigns, and I don't care about "hype". I watch trailers, sometimes, and if I'm interested, I try the thing out. If I'm not, I don't try the thing out. Even for the MMO I'm playing (FFXIV) I don't care for promotional material about the next expac.

Works wonders really. Yes, that means sometimes I am super late to the party (The Witcher 3). But I fail to see how it's an issue in the grand scheme of things to play a good game several years after it was released, for a fraction of its original price.

[Alienmorph]

If it was actually "information", the video would be 12 seconds long, and would say "Former TMS writer has been hired by Aspyr to work on KOTOR".

Since it's way longer than 12 seconds, it means it's not information, it's an opinion piece that builds the foundation for future outrage based on the reputation of a writer. They're probably already preparing the "I told you so" video when the game will be released - no matter how good it actually is, because if they can talk for several minutes about a one-line news, I'm sure a single minor detail in the released product that can be read through the "wokebad" prism will be enough for another angry video.

Yes, a writer being hired to work on a game is "information" - albeit an extremely minor one. Everything beyond that is speculation and opinion, and contributes fuck all to any civilized debate.

But, I mean, it works. You already state, based on the hiring of ONE PERSON, that "things aren't off to a promising start". Their job is done: they already have convinced some people to share their view.

You could literally say that about everyone writing an opinion piece about a piece of news. Yet you seem only to lash out only at this type of news report. Where was your righteous indignation at people exploting news for their narrative, when mainstream journalists literally wrote stuff like "We tried the new PS5, but you shouldn't care because Trump is still president"? Also yes, woke's still bad. Stop confusing extremists and clout chasers for people actually advocating for progressivism and equality. If you still can't tell the difference between the two, I really don't know what to tell you.

Okay, so, I went to their channel, sorted their videos by "Latest", and I had to go back 9 days to find one where they're talking out of their ass and making a completely wrong prediction (and that's just the one I know is wrong, maybe other, more recent ones are also completely full of BS):

They predicted a global grossing of 90M, and it's roughly double that right now (and still in theaters). That's very wrong. Or at least, that is sharing very wrong predictions.

So, uh, yeah, when you keep speculating, sometimes you'll be right. Basic math, Broken clock, etc.

Shang-Chi blindsided almost everyone, even Disney itself already wrote it off as a failure and moved on to promoting The Eternals and the next Spiderman movie. There's also a good chance Disney is inflating the numbers, as they've been known to do, but there's no proof of that as of now, so that's just mild speculation on my behalf. Still, a bad example doesn't prove or disprove much. Basic math, etc.

Well that one if fucking easy: I don't care about critics, I don't care about marketing campaigns, and I don't care about "hype". I watch trailers, sometimes, and if I'm interested, I try the thing out. If I'm not, I don't try the thing out. Even for the MMO I'm playing (FFXIV) I don't care for promotional material about the next expac.

Works wonders really. Yes, that means sometimes I am super late to the party (The Witcher 3). But I fail to see how it's an issue in the grand scheme of things to play a good game several years after it was released, for a fraction of its original price.

You don't care... except when you do. You seem to have clearly decided that there's people doing good information and critiquing and those who don't, if you just weren't interested, you'd dismiss them all equally, and I can't say you would be wrong to do it. We probably would be better off to stop listening ot the whole the current critique and journalism and let it fade away into obscurity. But humans are curious buggers, even to their own decrement, so that's probably not gonna happen.

And also ou're talking with someone who's usually years late to any party: see the fact I've only seen Stein's Gate last month, years after it was pretty much agreed to be one of the best anime ever, and who completely dodged the bullett to the testicles that was Game of Thrones, because he kept procrastinating on watching it until it was a one and done disasterpiece of a show. So you won't get me to argue on that, at least. A good piece of entertainment is good forever, no need to get to it when it's brand spanking new.

[TTTX]

True, true. The good old Divide and Conquer. High risk, but as high reward as it has ever been.

at least for now, plans like this can backfire really badly as seen when Germany send back Lenin to Russia and that ended up creating one of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century.

as Littlefinger said "Chaos is ladder" and you can bet someone is going to try and climb it.

If it was actually "information", the video would be 12 seconds long, and would say "Former TMS writer has been hired by Aspyr to work on KOTOR".

Since it's way longer than 12 seconds, it means it's not information, it's an opinion piece that builds the foundation for future outrage based on the reputation of a writer. They're probably already preparing the "I told you so" video when the game will be released - no matter how good it actually is, because if they can talk for several minutes about a one-line news, I'm sure a single minor detail in the released product that can be read through the "wokebad" prism will be enough for another angry video.

Yes, a writer being hired to work on a game is "information" - albeit an extremely minor one. Everything beyond that is speculation and opinion, and contributes fuck all to any civilized debate.

But, I mean, it works. You already state, based on the hiring of ONE PERSON, that "things aren't off to a promising start". Their job is done: they already have convinced some people to share their view.

Well it takes 2 to tango, both sides are very hostile to each other in the so called debate and it is most certainly not civilized.

yes I base my opinion on this 1 person being hired because of the year 2021 where "woke" culture is still a very powerful thing that a lot of bad crap both in existing and new properties have been made in the so called name of "inclusion" and "diversity" which are genrally not well executed and written and then criticisms happens which in return causes all the name calling the people toxic and some kind of isms.

Because it is currently 2021 and the world we live at moment, where you are either side with the "woke" culture or the enemy of "woke" culture, there is no middle ground, at least in the US.

[Ragabul]

@ people wanting monarchies or fascism or communism back

I'm not even close to being an expert in 20th century European politics but it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of that falls into two broad categories it tends to fall into everywhere. I'm using democracy as a stand-in for liberalism here and not as the dictionary meaning of democracy.

1) (Not really an issue so much in Western Europe) is that proto-democracies can really be terrible forms of government because you can't just flip a switch and become a functioning democracy overnight. A bunch of legal and bureaucratic realities have to change but even more importantly there is a genuine cultural change necessary. As one example, bribery and nepotism tend to be prominent in authoritarian states of all kinds or in really underdeveloped states with terrible infrastructure and service access. People will pay bribes not even so much because they are personally corrupted so to speak but because it's literally the only way to get anything done. The bureaucrat you need to help you just won't help you if you don't pay the expected bribe. The proto-democracy is going to depend on the same bureaucrat class used to getting bribes and population used to having to pay bribes. Deep distrust of the police (for usually good reasons) is another major problem. If you have corrupted government which is crappy at providing services, police forces you don't trust who also don't seem to be able to reduce violence, among other things, an authoritarian promising he will fix it looks really promising. And maybe things *were* better in some sense. Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator who led thousands to their deaths in a pointless war with Iran and who poisoned thousands of his own people. Nonetheless, some Iraqis could look back to portions of his reign as times when they weren't dealing with ISIS, daily suicide bombers in the market place, or constant American bombing.

2) (More likely to be a lot of the problem in Europe and the thing which is largely the problem in the USA) People fail to accept that democracy is a process and that it doesn't go anywhere in particular. Individuals or groups want particular policies or particular services or particular cultural mores but democracy is not designed to bring any of these about. Democracy is about doing what the majority wants (which could be literally anything) while safeguarding certain pre-defined minority rights that are always inviolate (and these rights are whatever the people who wrote the founding documents decided they should be and revisions are still subject to majority opinion). There is 0 guarantee that what you want is what the majority wants or that what the majority wants won't be illiberal. There is also 0 guarantee that the majority will get what it wants if it runs afoul of some minority right otherwise safeguarded. Democracy is about horse-trading and compromise. It is singularly terrible at making utopian visions come into being because when healthy it doesn't even pretend utopianism is possible. It does not care about what is "right" in some fundamental sense. It cares about letting the majority of people chose what is "right" for themselves and otherwise creating mechanisms whereby people with different opinions about what is right do not trample all over each other. People who have a very strong commitment to some vision of the "right" who do not believe that it is possible for truly logical, honest, or moral people to come to any conclusion but theirs, but who fail to get democracy to deliver the result they want (because not enough people support it), will oftentimes claim that the only logical explanation is that the democracy (or democracies in general) are corrupted. Revolutions, strongmen, and various other illiberal things start looking tempting to these people or they imagine rosy versions of the past where the thing they wanted was perhaps closer to reality.

I'm a reluctant liberal in this sense. Liberalism is singularly terrible at telling you what "the good life" should be and I think humans need to understand what that good life is in order to thrive. Most people are really bad at figuring it out and do better when an answer is provided to them via some set of traditions. But enough bad men abuse power when you give it to them to make massive concentrations of power independent of popular checks very dangerous. Dead men can't figure anything out or thrive. Metaphysical libertarianism is just as cruel as economic libertarianism. It means a lot of people will fall through the cracks. But the modern alternatives just aren't any better and you can't stuff men back into some (mostly imaginary) primal Eden either. (I mean the alternatives to metaphysical libertarianism, not economic. There are actually decent alternatives to the economic variety).

[Sinekein]

Because it is currently 2021 and the world we live at moment, where you are either side with the "woke" culture or the enemy of "woke" culture, there is no middle ground, at least in the US.

And yet, somehow, I spent several months enjoying my movies and my games without bothering about "woke culture" whatsoever.

With one simple trick: I don't watch idiotic youtubers and I don't read stupid Twitter users. And I'll be back to it once that thread dies down, because honestly, has any of you ever benefitted from those internet discussions about cancel culture or whatever? Or has it just made you angrier?

No one is forced to "side". You can choose to, but it's your own decision.

[Sinekein]

@ people wanting monarchies or fascism or communism back

I'm not even close to being an expert in 20th century European politics but it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of that falls into two broad categories it tends to fall into everywhere. I'm using democracy as a stand-in for liberalism here and not as the dictionary meaning of democracy.

1) (Not really an issue so much in Western Europe) is that proto-democracies can really be terrible forms of government because you can't just flip a switch and become a functioning democracy overnight. A bunch of legal and bureaucratic realities have to change but even more importantly there is a genuine cultural change necessary. As one example, bribery and nepotism tend to be prominent in authoritarian states of all kinds or in really underdeveloped states with terrible infrastructure and service access. People will pay bribes not even so much because they are personally corrupted so to speak but because it's literally the only way to get anything done. The bureaucrat you need to help you just won't help you if you don't pay the expected bribe. The proto-democracy is going to depend on the same bureaucrat class used to getting bribes and population used to having to pay bribes. Deep distrust of the police (for usually good reasons) is another major problem. If you have corrupted government which is crappy at providing services, police forces you don't trust who also don't seem to be able to reduce violence, among other things, an authoritarian promising he will fix it looks really promising. And maybe things *were* better in some sense. Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator who led thousands to their deaths in a pointless war with Iran and who poisoned thousands of his own people. Nonetheless, some Iraqis could look back to portions of his reign as times when they weren't dealing with ISIS, daily suicide bombers in the market place, or constant American bombing.

2) (More likely to be a lot of the problem in Europe and the thing which is largely the problem in the USA) People fail to accept that democracy is a process and that it doesn't go anywhere in particular. Individuals or groups want particular policies or particular services or particular cultural mores but democracy is not designed to bring any of these about. Democracy is about doing what the majority wants (which could be literally anything) while safeguarding certain pre-defined minority rights that are always inviolate (and these rights are whatever the people who wrote the founding documents decided they should be and revisions are still subject to majority opinion). There is 0 guarantee that what you want is what the majority wants or that what the majority wants won't be illiberal. There is also 0 guarantee that the majority will get what it wants if it runs afoul of some minority right otherwise safeguarded. Democracy is about horse-trading and compromise. It is singularly terrible at making utopian visions come into being because when healthy it doesn't even pretend utopianism is possible. It does not care about what is "right" in some fundamental sense. It cares about letting the majority of people chose what is "right" for themselves and otherwise creating mechanisms whereby people with different opinions about what is right do not trample all over each other. People who have a very strong commitment to some vision of the "right" who do not believe that it is possible for truly logical, honest, or moral people to come to any conclusion but theirs, but who fail to get democracy to deliver the result they want (because not enough people support it), will oftentimes claim that the only logical explanation is that the democracy (or democracies in general) are corrupted. Revolutions, strongmen, and various other illiberal things start looking tempting to these people or they imagine rosy versions of the past where the thing they wanted was perhaps closer to reality.

I'm a reluctant liberal in this sense. Liberalism is singularly terrible at telling you what "the good life" should be and I think humans need to understand what that good life is in order to thrive. Most people are really bad at figuring it out and do better when an answer is provided to them via some set of traditions. But enough bad men abuse power when you give it to them to make massive concentrations of power independent of popular checks very dangerous. Dead men can't figure anything out or thrive. Metaphysical libertarianism is just as cruel as economic libertarianism. It means a lot of people will fall through the cracks. But the modern alternatives just aren't any better and you can't stuff men back into some (mostly imaginary) primal Eden either. (I mean the alternatives to metaphysical libertarianism, not economic. There are actually decent alternatives to the economic variety).

Point 1 might have played a part in the financial issues Greece found itself in, but yes, in Western Europe, democracies mostly have had time to develop organically and reach a relatively satisfactory situation.

Point 2 is intrinsically tied with capitalism, a system that will both offer almost unlimited freedom, and create steeper and steeper inequalities, the two of which being really hard to reconcile. Since money still exists, it is hard to feel completely satisfied living in a country in which you can see others having access to luxuries that are not affordable for you, even if there is no law that exists to deny you access to that luxury. You would need an absolutely stellar political system for lower wages people not to resent in any way the situation they're in - and, again, under capitalism, it's impossible. If you decide to go full "laissez-faire", then all lower-wage jobs are under the risk of disappearing on the whims of the higher-ups, and are unlikely to make their holders having truly satisfying lives. If you go "socialist", then the price required to protect the workers will deter companies to invest (or they will move away), and some people will be dissatisfied.

What might be interesting in the coming decades is that at the moment, the country poised to be a dominant force in the world, even if it embraced capitalism fully, is still ruled by a Communist Party. Meaning that it is possible we might see a communist authoritarian regime offering the kind of benefits that might make Western countries envious.

I mean, just look at this headline: Chinese billionaires are lining to ensure their wealth profits the entire country at the moment...and it's not out of the kindness of their hearts; the Party just forced them to be nicer (and Jack Ma disappeared for several weeks last year...).

Meanwhile, in the US, the same entrepreneurs are in a dick-measuring contest to go to space. I mean, I could imagine many US people not minding seeing Bezos, Zuckerberg or Musk being suddenly "forced" by the government to share their wealth.

[TTTX]

And yet, somehow, I spent several months enjoying my movies and my games without bothering about "woke culture" whatsoever.

With one simple trick: I don't watch idiotic youtubers and I don't read stupid Twitter users. And I'll be back to it once that thread dies down, because honestly, has any of you ever benefitted from those internet discussions about cancel culture or whatever? Or has it just made you angrier?

No one is forced to "side". You can choose to, but it's your own decision.

and yet you seemed to get pissed about a video and decided to respond and post about it, how about you follow your own advice and ignore us who might want to discuss possible future disappointments.

[Ragabul]

because honestly, has any of you ever benefitted from those internet discussions about cancel culture or whatever? Or has it just made you angrier?

I actually enjoy debating so for me if it's about something halfassedly intelligent, important, or interesting it can be enjoyable. I mostly avoid the pop culture stuff because I mostly just don't care about pop culture anymore. Most all the things I like tend to be varying varieties of fringe or else popular but old and thus much harder to cancel or change. As I've stated, I care a lot about this stuff when it comes to universities, mainstream news, government bureaucracies, giant tech companies and so on. The fact I'm relatively powerless doesn't make it any less noteworthy. It's like global warming or the rise of China or any number of other troubling, important things that I really can't put a dent in.

I mean, just look at this headline: Chinese billionaires are lining to ensure their wealth profits the entire country at the moment...and it's not out of the kindness of their hearts; the Party just forced them to be nicer (and Jack Ma disappeared for several weeks last year...).

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what China is doing. They are not being redistributionist because they suddenly find bajillionaires icky. They are specifically gutting their social media style tech companies while leaving their "hard" tech companies mostly alone. They are attaking things that look like Facebook and Google while not targeting things that make microchips, robotics, or AI for purposes other than maximizing ad revenue. In other words, they are targeting things that disseminate information that the government potentially doesn't have control over while simultaneously allowing things that give them hard military and economic power to proceed.

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marke ... companies/

As for capitalism disrupting things in that way, I don't disagree. Marx himself:

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everwhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And, as in material, so also in intellectual production. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local iteratures there arises a world literature."

But capitalism and liberalism cannot be separated because the most fundamental rights that I'd argue must be there in order for anything even half-assedly calling itself freedom to exist are freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and freedom to be secure in your property. These are usually the first things authoritarians try to strip their enemies of.

Any purely materialist explanation for things (of which both capitalism and Marxism are) also aren't going to give you the full answer because even if materialism is true, the vast majority of people don't believe it's true and even most of the ones who do behave as if it isn't.

[Sinekein]

and yet you seemed to get pissed about a video and decided to respond and post about it, how about you follow your own advice and ignore us who might want to discuss possible future disappointments.

I am mostly pissed about the fact that behaviors like yours are the reason of the absolute mediocrity of the current discussions regarding culture.

The fact that something like Clownfish TV manages to have people interested in an entirely hypothetical future twitter shitstorm says it all really. It's not about the cultural work, it's about staying relevant in the horrendously stupid "Us vs Them" debates. I'm certain that you would never have had any contact with 90+% of the "woke media" you are so angry about were it not for assholes making a living out of getting people angry.

And yes, it's equally true with people who'll dig random books or games and single out something as "misogynistic" or "racist" or "transphobic" or whatever.

Both wokes and antiwokes are the reason "woke ideology" is seen as dominant. Without the constant Twitter/YT chatter, you can bet your ass that Disney or whoever else will quickly stop making their movies with "look how progressive I am" as their only depth. The only reason those movies are talked about is because of the comments they generate, which is how they get people to watch them and pay for them. The chatter dies, and they get forced to create movies with a plot that goes beyond "look, we are making something about [minority of the week]".

If you truly think that being angry and indignant online is eventually going to stop major game or movie companies to care about "wokism", then you haven't really been paying attention.

I actually enjoy debating so for me if it's about something halfassedly intelligent, important, or interesting it can be enjoyable. I mostly avoid the pop culture stuff because I mostly just don't care about pop culture anymore. Most all the things I like tend to be varying varieties of fringe or else popular but old and thus much harder to cancel or change. As I've stated, I care a lot about this stuff when it comes to universities, mainstream news, government bureaucracies, giant tech companies and so on. The fact I'm relatively powerless doesn't make it any less noteworthy. It's like global warming or the rise of China or any number of other troubling, important things that I really can't put a dent in.

If it's about the phenomenon as a whole, sure. But when you're down to desperately searching for incredibly minor news to get your daily fix of internet anger, it's almost entirely pointless. No matter the topic, nitpicking minor events is unlikely to create interesting and deep discussions, unless there is an actual, serious investigation on the subject to back it in and explain what happened - like what some journalists do when they pick something minor and create gigantic press articles on them, I remember a Guardian one on America's deadliest police force, for example. More recently, a French journalist made an in-depth investigation on the death of a French farmer.

Youtube or Twitter are more often than not antithetical to the kind of conversations you describe.

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what China is doing. They are not being redistributionist because they suddenly find bajillionaires icky. They are specifically gutting their social media style tech companies while leaving their "hard" tech companies mostly alone. They are attaking things that look like Facebook and Google while not targeting things that make microchips, robotics, or AI for purposes other than maximizing ad revenue. In other words, they are targeting things that disseminate information that the government potentially doesn't have control over while simultaneously allowing things that give them hard military and economic power to proceed.

I don't deny it, but the end result is that they strongarmed some billionaires into sharing more. And they weren't all social media tech companies. The difference is that the tech companies you described also saw the CCP get a hold on their operations for the reasons you mentioned - while they left strategic ones untouched.

But as a whole, the CCP probably does know what the consequences of too much wealth hoarded by not enough people can be. They have decades of Western development to look at for this. So while it is done for cynical and not humanitarian reasons, the result is not so different - and since those "giveaways" have been publicized, the Chinese population will know about it, giving even more incentive to other billionaires to follow suit (I read that some theoretize that Jeff Bezos' rather tiny nonprofit - which is about fighting homelessness I think? - only came to life because of how Bill Gates and his foundation made him look).

[Ragabul]

Smart blogger I read is gonna do a multi-stage postmortem on Afghanistan by reading a bunch of books on the topic and posting what he finds there.

First post is up and is about a memoir written by one of the chief guys at the Pentagon during the Bush administration:

https://scholars-stage.org/learning-fro ... -rumsfeld/

[Sinekein]

Smart blogger I read is gonna do a multi-stage postmortem on Afghanistan by reading a bunch of books on the topic and posting what he finds there.

First post is up and is about a memoir written by one of the chief guys at the Pentagon during the Bush administration:

https://scholars-stage.org/learning-fro ... -rumsfeld/

Very interesting read, bookmarked.

I recently listened to several podcasts mentioning how much retaliation/revenge was crucial in the process of the War on Terror - without being openly admitted - but those were mostly done by journalists who spent a lot of time in the Middle East and observed US operations, not by people doing a deep analysis of US Defence policies.

[Vol]

Any video trying to analyze her actual contribution right now to the game is just hot fucking air. It has zero substance. When you share it on the net, you just help make this large bag of nothingness somewhat relevant, and you promote the kind of empty discussions born from absolutely fucking nothing that matters.

This would be reasonable if we could assume blind hiring practices. If this lady and Ben Shapiro had equal chances of applying for this job, assuming similar levels of experience. We cannot assume that, so we can infer intent, and we can extrapolate the consequences, much like if they'd hired Ben Shapiro instead.

*Monarchists*

Huh. Interesting. Good to get a perspective from the motherland (I recently found out my mother's side is predominately French, whereas I'd always assumed it was more Irish).

I outlined my view on what the western right is becoming a few months back with Raga, but in a nutshell, Trumpism is a vague vision to return us to the golden age of the post war boom in America. With the structure and tradition of the "old times" still around, but the libertine freedoms to ignore it all and go be weekend hedonists. That brief slice of opulence and naivety, where smoking dope at parties was cool and transgressive, but you didn't have crackfiends shambling around like zombies. You could mock virgins and have swinger parties, but AIDS didn't exist and marriages still held. The bronco bucks against the reins, but he's still glad to be on a nicely maintained farm.

That's what I distill from the general movement, you can slap your father's face without being pummeled, but only because he let you sit on his lap to begin with. As opposed to the maternal opposite that we have now. Which is something that our republics have willingly failed to uphold, they've both literally and metaphorically acted like single mothers with low standards. They had excellent reasons to do so, but those excellent reasons seem like rationalizing personal failures. And then we can remember a different time, when there was a father figure, and it doesn't seem so bad.

So for the average conservative that isn't a neocon, it's a longing for a period of time that cannot be replicated, but rejecting the death spiral of neoliberalism is necessary. They don't necessarily want to bow and scrape to a king, or deal with a dictator's arbitrary whims and brutality, but much like the fagging system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging), when you have a choice between the capricious rule of masses who are very rapidly turning against you, or the capricious rule of nobility, you make a judgement call.

It's moot in America, as we're built specifically in opposition to monarchy, so our slide in authoritarianism is relatively novel.

I'm a reluctant liberal in this sense. Liberalism is singularly terrible at telling you what "the good life" should be and I think humans need to understand what that good life is in order to thrive. Most people are really bad at figuring it out and do better when an answer is provided to them via some set of traditions. But enough bad men abuse power when you give it to them to make massive concentrations of power independent of popular checks very dangerous. Dead men can't figure anything out or thrive. Metaphysical libertarianism is just as cruel as economic libertarianism. It means a lot of people will fall through the cracks. But the modern alternatives just aren't any better and you can't stuff men back into some (mostly imaginary) primal Eden either. (I mean the alternatives to metaphysical libertarianism, not economic. There are actually decent alternatives to the economic variety).

I'm caught in a weird space where I'm trying to learn more of older times, fundamentally different ways of thinking and living, but I can't get a handhold. The ideas are ephemeral, my mind has been conditioned my entire life to unerringly accept liberalism as the way and the light, and I cannot decouple this from my inquisitive thoughts, it's the permanent lens. So it always seems intuitive that limited government and rights and free enterprise are inherently superior to the more survival-based strongman systems, and their more modern forms, but I cannot tell if that's on the merits or not. Has largely solving hunger and crippling poverty in the west a result of our enlightened thinking, or, a critical mass of knowledge having finally survived long enough? Is my right to be free and succeed wildly/fuck up completely better than if I were a serf with a set path? Is the boundless empathy for our fellow man a feature of our liberalism or a consequence of the beliefs that led to liberalism (It's the latter)?

But in a dumber, succinct sense: Things getting worse, what if thing Grug's father's father do better?

[Ragabul]

@ ancient ways of thinking

This is perhaps even harder than you may think because I'd say most of history is written in something that to some degree amounts to a modern worldview. It's written. History is written by the literate, not by the victors. The very fact you are reading it presupposes it comes from a culture that values the written word to some degree or other. People like to focus on agriculture as the thing that separates stages of humans, but mass agriculture pretty much demands record keeping of some kind, either literal writing systems or something more indirect like Stonehenge or Cohokia which are astronomically aligned and tell you when to plant, when to sacrifice, etc.

I'm currently reading the autobiography/conversion experience of Augustine who lives right at the transition from Roman antiquity to the Middle Ages. His world is one where Manichaens are still running around, where being tempted to go to the gladiatorial games is a thing an aspiring Christian has to deal with, and where not so long ago most everybody were still pagans and Christians were getting thrown to lions. And yet, he's utterly understandable. One because this is not a hagiography written hundreds of years later, but a book written by himself focusing on his sins (hence Confessions). Two, because he is a man of letters who gets his living by teaching rhetoric and writing books and orations. The book is filled with the exact same kinds of existential turmoil and questions about theodicy and the nature of mind and thoughts and whether or not we have free will that you find in pretty much any angsty internet discussion on the topic today.

I also read a book a while ago called called The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins which was a sort of cultural history of the Great War era looking at how culture and mores shifted before the war (as part of what led to the war) and how they shifted because of the war. Germany at that time was an ascendant power, which was deeply disturbing to other European powers that had been dominant. The book looks at the kind of cultural propaganda wars in the arts used by Germans (and various people disgusted or sick of Britain and France for whatever reason) to present Germany as dynamic, liberated, & youthful as compared specifically to the British who were stulted, moribund, and hide-bound Victorians. One of the chief ways this was done was by equating Britain with schoolmarm style Christianity and Germany with heroic paganism. (To be fair, this went both ways. "Huns" was a word used in that era for Germans to conflate them with pagan barbarism). The Rite of Spring of the title was a ballet about a pagan fertility festival meant to be maximally carnal and aesthetically shocking for the effect of thumbing Victorian noses. So here's an example of tearing up a bunch of traditions by the roots by appealing to an older set of traditions that arguably sets the stage for the war that tears up pretty much all traditions by the roots.

I give all that preamble to stage the question "Who is Grug, anyway?" Is he Augustine who won't quietly inherit the Christian faith of his mother but goes an a 30 year detour of every faddish heresy he can find and then only comes around by reason and inquiry? Is it the Yamnaya who statistically speaking are probably the direct ancestors of everybody posting on this forum who we wouldn't even know existed without modern genomics and linguistics because they left no written records? Is it the Germans making an appeal to pagan antiquity or the British defending the traditions of Christianity from barbarians? This is not me trying to be evasive or obnoxiously postmodern. I'm not a relativist. Some cultures are better than others. Good ones are just as likely to be in the past as the present or the future. As I've said before, the past existed and the future is functionally imaginary so it makes a lot more sense to mine the existent for answers than it does the nonexistent. And one thing looking at the past has convinced me of is that you can't put technology genies back in bottles and wherever record keeping exists humans gradually use it to lay claim over nature (both external nature and human nature). Men don't get any better but the tools we use to convince ourselves that we are get more powerful all the time.

*Edit*

Put another way, I think a perfectly defensible metanarrative of human history is "the stakes of despotism get higher all the time."

*Edit*

Also, an ironic thought I had while watching a documentary about American Indians earlier. It was three parts and the last part was oozing at the pores with what's called subaltern studies. It's possibly the wokest academic discipline there is. And yet, it's also perhaps the most relevant for people convinced that cultural conservatism or traditional Christianity or patriarchy or whatever is or is about to be swamped by an essentially colonialist mass of elites trying to eradicate it. It studies how peasants and various other lowest of the low maintain their culture over time despite colonialism. That book I joked about in the main thread Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India is the founding tome of this stuff, which is why I have it. But I've yet to read it.

[Ragabul]

One more on this which I'll put in a new post to avoid eternal stealth edits.

Another key difference in this might also just be that I'm more of a pessimist than you are which is sort of a weird position for somebody defending liberalism. My answer to "how does one survive the neoliberal death spiral" is something like "Go Amish" or "found a monastery." If Rome is going to fall, no amount of spit and tape is going to put her back together. If you want answers for how kernels of truth survive against unrelenting onslaughts against them look to American Indians and Jews and Christian dissidents in Soviet Russia and Christians meeting in catacombs in 1st century Rome. This is less pressing for me because I have no kids and I'm not employed in a field that will probably go post-truth any time soon. But if I can be excused for being melodramatic, I'm determined to have a monastery in my brain and on my bookshelves.

And to bring it back to technology, we are now closer to a period in which a total surveillance state is possible than we've ever been before. The mundane even currently anemic tools of liberalism allow dissidence in ways that non liberal alternatives don't even pretend to do.

[Ragabul]

In the genre of "Afghanistan postmortem" here is the full text of Letter to America written by Osama bin Laden in 2002. I was in like 10th grade when this came out and utterly oblivious to news or politics so I had no idea it even existed and even if I had I wouldn't have been able to understand most of what he's talking about then.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/ ... heobserver

Real hard to read that and then pretend religion has 0 to do with any of this. Knowing that 99% of Muslims aren't Jihadis while also accepting that the 1% who are very much have religious motivations (among others) seems to be a chain of thoughts very few people are capable of holding in their head at once.

*Edit*

Additional interesting link: https://advisoryopinions.thedispatch.co ... ortion-law

Podcast giving a very detailed legal breakdown about what the Texas abortion law does and doesn't do and what it's implications are for future laws.

TLDR The law is constructed in such a way that it makes it borderline impossible for the Supreme Court to issue an injunction to stop the law from going into effect because there is no particular person they can enjoin. The law is enforced by lawsuits brought by private citizens and not by state officials. Thus there is nobody to tell to stop enforcement because nobody has brought a suit yet. Once some actual person brings a suit, the suit can be challenged and the law almost certainly overturned on constitutional grounds. What's noteworthy about this is not so much that people have found a way to ban abortion as to create a mechanism that's immune to injunction until some actual private citizen starts a suit to enforce the law. This is a not great part of the law because there is nothing stopping people from constructing similar laws enforced by private lawsuit that abridges pretty much any constitutional right they want. Second amendment would be the obvious one to go after here from the left. The question is not whether or not the eventual lawsuit will get the law thrown out (it probably will), but how long until that happens and how many gun stores/abortion clinics/whatever are driven under while waiting.

[Sinekein]

This would be reasonable if we could assume blind hiring practices. If this lady and Ben Shapiro had equal chances of applying for this job, assuming similar levels of experience. We cannot assume that, so we can infer intent, and we can extrapolate the consequences, much like if they'd hired Ben Shapiro instead.

Ben Shapiro is a bad example because he is not a fiction writer. Unlike that woman from TMS who did write fiction novels.

But aside from that, the main problem is that anti-wokes only exist as an opposition force. They do not create anything, they only complain about what the wokes are proposing.

If you hire a writer with the "woke" label, then you might do it with the expectation that s/he will try to, I don't know, make the cast more diverse, or include some specific teams. That is an addition to the writing, for better or worse (and, sidenote, it's becoming less and less significant, and in all likelihood will keep decreasing in significance until it reaches a point where it becomes completely detrimental because of how few people truly care about their additions, but I digress).

Now, what can you expect from hiring an anti-woke dude (I say dude because, c'mon)? Is he going to make sure all the cast is white? Is he going to reduce the agenda of female characters, or weaken them to fit their biological inferiority? Enlarge their boobs? Skimpify their clothes? Make sure nonwhite NPCs are violent and evil?

I mean, of course not, because that would be horrendously stupid. But mostly, it is because anything the wokes claim to defend still exists. And has existed for a while. White, male characters have not evaporated. They still are by far the most common in fiction media.

And, worse, the vast majority of those who defend the "woke" movement don't mind. Aside from maybe some very fringe idiots, no one wants to erase white male characters. No one wants to make male muscles forbidden, or to make it impossible to create a beautiful female character because that's ableist against uglies or whatever. There are games that are loved by wokes...that are full of characters and tropes anti-wokes would adore too. Like, Mass Effect is clearly on the "woke" side if you look at the themes, and yet you still get a ton of female eye candy or to play Broshep as an unstoppable macho sex god/killing machine. I play FF14, and while it has a japanese aesthetic, one of the most popular characters is Estinien Wyrmblood who is chadness personified.

So the reason there aren't many "anti-woke" writers is that they don't bring anything to the writing process. All they can do is say they will remake things that have existed for a while. So why would you hire them?

And to bring it back to technology, we are now closer to a period in which a total surveillance state is possible than we've ever been before. The mundane even currently anemic tools of liberalism allow dissidence in ways that non liberal alternatives don't even pretend to do.

And the main problem is that the same tools that are used for total surveillance are also what gives people the illusion of total freedom. I need something? I can buy it immediately. I want to know something? Let's go online. I want to talk to someone? There is a social network for that.

But neoliberals have so far been really good to, indeed, call anyone discussing maybe toning economic growth or online connectivity down "Amish". Even in France, actually (has been said verbatim by our president to mock people who did not want 5G - and those were not only tinfoil hat-wearing loonies, some people oppose the 5G because of the energy or environmental cost).

I wonder if in time we will get an equivalent to the Godwin point for the Amish.

TLDR The law is constructed in such a way that it makes it borderline impossible for the Supreme Court to issue an injunction to stop the law from going into effect because there is no particular person they can enjoin.

Not even covering the details of that horrendously stupid law, but that looks like the perfect recipe for future conservative indignation. When you clearly find a loophole to game the system, it means you gave your opponents the method to do so. Now, maybe they are convinced the SCOTUS will be theirs forever, but if the Dems end up getting a streak similar to Trump's, we will see a lot of surprised Pikachus among conservative supporters when similar laws go against their beliefs this time.

That is why I don't really understand the "no matter the method" that is used by the GOP and Mitch McConnell recently. I mean sure, in the short term, they have been a complete nuisance to the Dems, but they are also making it so that Dem supporters are very likely not to care anymore about the moral high ground they usually like to have as liberals. Many are already A-OK with adding more judges to the SCOTUS, or adding more Senators to the senate. Since demographics seem to be favoring them in the long term, the desperate attempts to pass uber-conservative laws at all costs might very well blow in their faces very hard in the next decades. And a quick look at the 2015-202x era will be enough for them to find all the methods their opponents rely on.

[Ragabul]

If you mean the de-growth stuff, I admit I'm skeptical because as I already said, I mostly don't think you can put technology genies back in bottles. Sometimes a collapse means functional de-growth anyway and a loss of technology (like the collapse of Rome leading to decline in the circulation in papyrus as a writing format in Europe and to much more expensive and harder to make vellum which led to an overall reduction in books and writing). I don't know of any civilization that ever *chose* de-growth and pulled it off.

But pockets of people living in a more sustainable way by choice both in environmental terms and in metaphysical terms is certainly possible. And if there is a collapse, those people are probably the ones who will do best.

I am deeply sympathetic to degrowth on some level though. In my lalaland utopia of choice, human cities would look like elf cities, full of trees and animals and there would be way fewer of us.

*Edit*

Also I forgot to add one thing on the "woke" stuff. Woke is already on the downhill end of the linguistic treadmill which makes it functionally useless as anything but an insult word. Critical race theory has already peaked and is now going down this slope as well. It's made worse because there are a whole of lot people actively working to obscure meanings for various strategic reasons. But there is a real thing there buried under all the noise.

The way I define it is kinda as follows: Woke refers to a grab bag of academic and popular ideas that are illiberal and essentialist. They hold that modern societies are polluted at core in all their systems by various evils that perpetuate inequalities along essentialist lines of race, gender, sex, and sexual orientation. This systems are so embedded into the foundation of liberalism that liberalism itself cannot fix them and you must resort to illiberal measures to change outcomes. Thus the suspension of various civil rights is just fine if doing so reduces disparities along essentialist categories. Because they are essentialist, they hold that different categories of people have essentialist innate knowledge and thus only certain varieties of people are qualified to understand certain topics or develop policy on them.

There's a whole lot of variety within that and there's some other general traits I could probably put forward but I think that captures the core of it. There's also 0 reason people on the right can't use this framework either. It doesn't have to be specifically left leaning.

All this makes things tricky because a specific action can be progressive in some sense without really being woke. Like making the choice to add a black character into a TV show is not in and of itself woke. There's 10000 reasons you could do this with a standard liberal or even conservative framework. (Something like "I am making a character intended to be a role model for black youth who are in sore need of being taught to mend their ways.") The thing that makes it woke is *why* you chose to do it which is unknowable in some cases and if unknowable probably irrelevant because the thing isn't proselytizing. It does often tend to making the work suck more though.

Woke capitalism (which I'm defining as companies making merely cosmetic appeals to woke philosophies) ends up neutering the work of a lot of artists who are probably genuinely woke in some sense. Like Black Panther may have had any number of woke people making it hoping to put out woke messages in it (I have no idea if this is true or not) but the most Disney would let them do was some really watery postcolonialism. (I'd say the single most overt scene in the whole movie is the one where Killmonger talks to and then I think kills a white woman at some museum with a bunch of African masks. It's like maybe 3 minutes of the whole movie. The initial bad guy white guy whose name I don't remember is to terrible that's it's very easy for white people to distance themselves from him. The white woman is just a "nice white lady" museum curator). Thus while the woke artist may have produced something revolutionary and interesting (though probably more likely preachy and boring just like how most overtly Christian movies suck), what ends up happening more often when crammed through woke capitalismis is some kind of terrible quota system or characters that keep making obnoxious aphoristic asides about woke topics in really eye-rolling ways. The Dragon Prince as another example is unwatchable to me for these reasons while Avatar: the Last Airbender is really good while having truly revolutionary ideas (radical nonviolence) and 0 white people.

So I actually think that on balance woke artist plus woke capitalism almost always ends up making something suck more than it otherwise would have done even if it's still fine most of the time. And pure woke artist with 0 filters forced on him and with no nuance in his ideology produces a good work approximately as often as a Christian ideologue with no sense of tragedy and suffering does, which is to say almost never.

[Mazder]

I am deeply sympathetic to degrowth on some level though. In my lalaland utopia of choice, human cities would look like elf cities, full of trees and animals and there would be way fewer of us.

So cities like Singapore on steroids. In terms of construction.

[Ragabul]

Yes actually like the Singapore airport but with less density probably coupled with some radical advances in AI and robotics that eliminate most terrible jobs and let people work from home removing need for large amounts of mechanized transit. Most people would probably end up living in some place that looked less like Singapore and more some place that looked like modern day Hobbiton.