2024 Republican Primary

[Queen Boo]

Another gripe I have against right wingers is the hypocritical nature of railing against safety net programs for the average citizen but when companies get welfare from the federal government not a single peep from their side.

My biggest gripe against right wingers is literally everything about them.

[Jwb]

^ ... then Nimbly has a more atypical history than I ever imagined ! Good for you, Nimbly.

... though on the issue of moving, I don't entirely support your "me and other people have done it, so can you" attitude. That may be theoretically true, but it's still a challenge that some people feel they can't risk. For example, "you can apply for work weeks, even months ahead of time" is true in some cases, I'm sure, but applies mainly to people who have good internet access and who are looking for employment that is grand enough to be advertised online. If you aim to get a waiter's job, that avenue may not work for you. Plus, of course, there's a big difference between applying for a job and getting a job.
_______________________________________________

Great news that those fake LLCs are getting tracked down, DJ. 

I think you might've misunderstood what I was saying, DJ. I was only suggesting that government agencies could learn from mega-companies about how to manage huge amounts of money more efficiently, without the $247 billion in unaccounted leakage that Nimbly mentioned. I'm not a right winger who doesn't want to pay taxes - though I'm prepared to accept the charge of being whiney. 

the "just move" argument isn't dumb cause people can't move.  It's dumb because we don't want to have an a la carte approach to human rights.  Like we could have told black people to just move out of the south instead of ending jim crow.   But we just don't want to allow for these pockets of persecution to exist in the first place.

So if someone sees abortion as a right or gender affirming care as a right, obviously they aren't going to be ok with denying people said rights on a state by state basis based on whatever the local culture and politics are.  Like it makes 0 sense for abortion to be murder in Florida but just a part of healthcare in Ny. It's either murder or its not.  Gender affirming care is either harming children or helping children or its not.  There's no coherence to pretending like we can continue to live together in one nation under a sort of amicable divorce where we still share the house but we're doing our own thing.  That's not how nation states work. If theres a divorce in this country, it's going to be a messy one. In the meantime, people will just keep flirting with the idea and bifurcating into their selective echo chambers, which will only breed more internal instability. It's a very precarious situation that we are currently in. 

[SGR]

Like it makes 0 sense for abortion to be murder in Florida but just a part of healthcare in Ny. It's either murder or its not.  Gender affirming care is either harming children or helping children or its not.  There's no coherence to pretending like we can continue to live together in one nation under a sort of amicable divorce where we still share the house but we're doing our own thing.  That's not how nation states work. If theres a divorce in this country, it's going to be a messy one. In the meantime, people will just keep flirting with the idea and bifurcating into their selective echo chambers, which will only breed more internal instability. It's a very precarious situation that we are currently in. 

I get where you're coming from, but defining some of these things concretely is difficult.

Conservatives and Democrats don't even agree with their own party about abortion. Some conservatives might see it as murder no matter how quickly an abortion is performed after conception. Others might see it as murder when the fetus begins to have a conscious experience. And to complicate things further, when is it 'murder' and when is it 'terminating a pregnancy'? If we frame abortion as murder (which I don't think the majority of the country does), then wouldn't it almost always be immoral to do (save for maybe if the pregnancy endangered the life of the mother), even in cases of rape?

I don't think the gender affirming care is that simple either, is it? I mean, couldn't it be more grey than black and white? I'm by no means an expert on gender affirming care, especially in regards to children but e.g. it helps some children in the long run and ends up harming others in the long run? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think we have a surefire way to know for certain whether gender affirming care will end up being a net positive or a net negative in the long run for a child at this moment in time, but we'll hopefully get there in the future.

I completely agree about the precarious situation we're in as a country though. I think (or at least hope) that Civil War and national divorce is a step too far, and that cooler heads would prevent that from ever happening, but it really is like we're living in different realities from each other. We're all in the same theater, but we're watching completely different movies. No clue how you rectify that, but the media (on both sides of the political aisle) share a large responsibility for where we are.

[Jwb]

I think you're somewhat missing my point,  to be honest.  I'm not saying either of those issues are black and white.  I'm saying we're talking about basic questions of rights so expecting people to just move to the state that corresponds with their stance on the culture war is a ridiculous solution.

There are things that we can have on a state by state basis where people can pick and choose and vote with their feet, etc. Taxes would be a good example.  But things like abortion,  gay rights, trans rights etc.  That's not at all a good solution. We can have cultural differences and disagreements and still live in the same nation up to a point.  But the civil war proved that if you allow that difference to become profound enough then there does come a breaking point.

That doesn't mean all states have necessarily have the same exact abortion laws or whatever. But at a certain point if the differences are great enough there is a built in incoherence to the policy. Like theoretically a nation that in one state is letting people abort at will up until birth and another state says taking plan b is murder.  I think those two states existing under the same regime would be a sign that the contradictions have actually reached the level where we are left pondering the prospect of civil war.

[DJChameleon]

I don't think the gender affirming care is that simple either, is it? I mean, couldn't it be more grey than black and white? I'm by no means an expert on gender affirming care, especially in regards to children but e.g. it helps some children in the long run and ends up harming others in the long run? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think we have a surefire way to know for certain whether gender affirming care will end up being a net positive or a net negative in the long run for a child at this moment in time, but we'll hopefully get there in the future.
 

One thing is for certain we shouldn't decide what parents do for their own children. The government shouldn't have the last say when it comes to a parent's right to make decisions for their own children.

[Nimbly9]

the "just move" argument isn't dumb cause people can't move.  It's dumb because we don't want to have an a la carte approach to human rights.  Like we could have told black people to just move out of the south instead of ending jim crow.   But we just don't want to allow for these pockets of persecution to exist in the first place.

And we never will my friend, which is precisely why it isn't a dumb argument. You are missing the forest for the trees.  Our concept of human rights is a pretty new thing in the grand scheme of things.  But people have always found a way to go where they wanted to go, especially if they don't like where they are.  The world is a big place and that's both a good thing and a bad thing depending on how you look at it.

Would any human beings exist on the North American or Eurasian continents if people hadn't travelled their asses off looking for resources, better weather, etc. tens of thousands of years ago? Probably not.

I'm all for making change - I just don't see how it would be less of a hassle to go to a river where the fish are already swimming around instead of trying to convince everyone around you to carve that river out under your feet from scratch. 

[DJChameleon]

I'm all for making change - I just don't see how it would be less of a hassle to go to a river where the fish are already swimming around instead of trying to convince everyone around you to carve that river out under your feet from scratch. 

This is where you and jwb will have to agree to disagree.

I get jwb's point. Leaving a situation and going to path of least resistance may work for you but it pretty much spits in the face of everyone that you leave begind that has to deal with the shit you are running away from. I honestly don't think you are all for change because to make change you have to face adversary head on not run away from it.

The road/path less traveled and all that jazz.

[Nimbly9]

This is where you and jwb will have to agree to disagree.

I get jwb's point. Leaving a situation and going to path of least resistance may work for you but it pretty much spits in the face of everyone that you leave begind that has to deal with the shit you are running away from. I honestly don't think you are all for change because to make change you have to face adversary head on not run away from it.

The road/path less traveled and all that jazz.

He's entitled to his opinion.  I don't have magical thinking in regards to change. And you'd have to be able define what exactly it is you want to change and what the feasibility of it is. 

If someone is thinking they can move to San Francisco and turn it into the bastion of conservative Christendom or move to Hamtramck, Michigan and turn it less Muslim or less conservative, they are probably wasting their time.  Funnily enough though, real change actually does tend to happen when enough people "just move" to a new place and then vote, which is how Florida flipped red.  It's a numbers game and people should do their homework on it.

[DJChameleon]

It's a numbers game and people should do their homework on it.

Voting isnt the only way to fight and it's not even the best way. I'm on the ground as a grassroots organizer. I know first hand. I don't need to do any research.

[Jwb]

And we never will my friend, which is precisely why it isn't a dumb argument. You are missing the forest for the trees.  Our concept of human rights is a pretty new thing in the grand scheme of things.  But people have always found a way to go where they wanted to go, especially if they don't like where they are.  The world is a big place and that's both a good thing and a bad thing depending on how you look at it.

Would any human beings exist on the North American or Eurasian continents if people hadn't travelled their asses off looking for resources, better weather, etc. tens of thousands of years ago? Probably not.

I'm all for making change - I just don't see how it would be less of a hassle to go to a river where the fish are already swimming around instead of trying to convince everyone around you to carve that river out under your feet from scratch. 

what forest am i missing? Your sole point seems to be that people can move.  It's not so much a bad argument as it is not really an argument at all.  It seems like you think that the qanon people can have one corner of the country and the lgbt have another and we can just self segregate our way to peace. I think that is a non-solution, for a number of reasons.

Think about the lgbt question. Gay people are just going to keep popping up in conservative areas and having to move to blue areas of they wanted to be accepted.  It's not like they only get born in places that are accepting.  So we're putting the perpetual onus on them to flee conservative areas rather than the cultural imposition of expecting them to be more accepting. 

And you can say such impositions don't work or that people's minds won't be changed, but again, we did exactly that in order to end jim crow. And people's mind set at the time certainly didn't seem poised to change any time soon either.  But eventually that is what happened, through a combination of state force and social pressure.

We've seen similar though not quite as drastic developments over the last few decades with gay rights and gay marriage in particular.  That also wasn't done state by state.  It was pushed down through the Supreme court. If we had waited for it in a state by state basis, it would still be illegal in many states.

The conservatives have no less of a desire to push their agenda federally either though. The states rights talking point gets trotted out selectively to fight federal policies they specifically don't like.  It won't stop them from lets say having a federal abortion ban, if they had the opportunity to make that happen. 

Since the politics of the country are radicalizing in both directions, our ability to coexist peacefully is actually diminished.  And if the only option is self segregation along political lines then that would seem to me to be a likely prelude to actual civil conflict.


People do move and moving is useful.  But generally they do so for economic opportunities and resources, like the examples you cited.  The prospect of choosing where you want to live based on these ideological culture wars seems very different.  It also abandons any prospect of changing a place like Mississippi if everyone who has any inclination for change moves out of the state.

[Jwb]

He's entitled to his opinion.  I don't have magical thinking in regards to change. And you'd have to be able define what exactly it is you want to change and what the feasibility of it is. 

If someone is thinking they can move to San Francisco and turn it into the bastion of conservative Christendom or move to Hamtramck, Michigan and turn it less Muslim or less conservative, they are probably wasting their time.  Funnily enough though, real change actually does tend to happen when enough people "just move" to a new place and then vote, which is how Florida flipped red.  It's a numbers game and people should do their homework on it.

no you likely can't change the demos in a big city like san fran to be a Christian conservative city, but that's not what we're debating.

If san fran  or california persecuted local Christians or denied them certain rights i think that would be unacceptable and we should expect them to stop doing so, rather than expect the Christians to move to where they might have more rights.

[Nimbly9]

Jwb, telling people that there's no differences between the races versus telling people that there's no biological distinction or meaning to men vs women and that people can be whatever they feel they are at any given moment (see: Neil DeGrasse Tyson's recent comments) is a VERY different policy sell, one that I don't think is ultimately going to go over well with people across a wide variety of demographics.

There's also a lot of back-pedaling going on in other places besides the U.S. in regards to the long-term viability of some kinds of gender affirming care, nations that are supposedly way ahead of us on these issues.  We are hearing very different messages from health authorities in Sweden and Norway and the U.K. versus the APA and left-leaning organizations over here. Why do you think that is?

I'd wager a guess that we are more likely to see science progress to the point where gender dysphoria can actually be reversed or treated without affirmation than we are to see some kind of unilateral political acceptance of that kind of goalpost moving in society outside of blue states/cities.  Will likely cost less money compared to the years of treatments and doctor appointments and counseling. How long will that be? That's the million dollar question.

You are correct that people will still be born in conservative places that will get lumped under the LGBTQ spectrum somewhere, but you aren't looking at the endgame of where things will actually go.  This is a medical thing in the eyes of politicians and others, not an immutable characteristic like race.  We're within 10 years of eliminating aging and yet some think nobody will crack the code on aligning a person to their biological sex? It's not a matter of "if"...but "when".

The entire reason gender affirming care even exists is because dysphoria is acknowledged as a less-than-ideal state of existence that requires varying degrees of medical intervention.  But despite all the talk about how good affirmation is, today's solutions are still just another form of being put on pills for the rest of your life.  We're still in the stone age for all intents and purposes.  Our medical capabilities in treating cancers, for example, is a million lightyears ahead of the science around gender affirming care and we still don't produce good outcomes most of the time.

But as polarizing as something like that is, it'll just lead (at worst) to a begrudging national divorce where blue states will be a lot more permissive in regards to their John Money-inspired curriculums versus red states where they will continue to be extremely skeptical about those subjects, even at the expense of people's individual feelings.

But comparing something that even liberal Europe and liberal America can't agree on...I'd be interested in seeing what the U.S. will ultimately do at the federal level once all the chips are down.  I don't see a timeline where the government is going to convince families with kids that kinky public drag shows are some kind of necessity of life or that Pride parades where dudettes walk around fully naked and erect is the next great moral battlefield of our time, but you just never know how things will end up.

[Lexi Darling]

Telling people that there's no differences between the races and telling people that there's no biological distinction or meaning to men vs women and that people can be whatever they feel they are at any given moment (see: Neil DeGrasse Tyson's recent comments) is a very different sell, one that I don't think is ultimately going to go over well with people across a wide variety of demographics.  There's also a lot of back-pedelling going on in other places besides the U.S. in regards to the long-term viability of some kinds of gender affirming care.  We are hearing very different messages from health authorities in Sweden and Norway and the U.K. versus the APA and left-leaning organizations over here.

You are more likely to see science progress to the point where gender dysphoria can actually be reversed or treated without affirmation than you are to see some kind of unilateral acceptance of that kind of goalpost moving in society outside of blue states/cities.  Probably cost less money too compared to the years of treatments and doctor appointments and counseling. 

How long will that be? That's the million dollar question. You are correct that people will still be born in conservative places that will get lumped under the LGBTQ spectrum somewhere, but you aren't looking at the endgame of where things will actually go.  This is a medical thing, not an immutable characteristic like race. 

The entire reason gender affirming care even exists is because dysphoria is acknowledged as a less-than-ideal state of existence that requires medical intervention.  But despite all the talk about how good affirmation is, today's solutions are still just another form of being put on pills for the rest of your life.  We're still in the stone age for all intents and purposes.  Our medical capabilities in treating cancers, for example, is a million lightyears ahead of the science around gender affirming care and we still don't produce good outcomes most of the time.

But as polarizing as something like that is, it'll just lead (at worst) a quiet national divorce where blue states will be a lot more permissive in regards to their John Money-inspired curriculums versus red states where they will continue to be extremely skeptical about those subjects, even at the expense of people's individual feelings.

But comparing something that even liberal Europe and liberal America can't agree on...I'd be interested in seeing what the U.S. will ultimately do at the federal level once all the chips are down.  I don't see a timeline where the government is going to convince families with kids that kinky public drag shows are some kind of necessity of life or that Pride parades where dudettes walk around fully naked and erect is the next great moral battlefield of our time, but you just never know how things will end up.

Every time I think I've seen it all with your bad faith transphobic takes, you post something even more bad faith and transphobic.

How about the government just leaves trans people the fuck alone.

[Nimbly9]

Every time I think I've seen it all with your bad faith transphobic takes, you post something even more bad faith and transphobic.

How about the government just leaves trans people the fuck alone.

Tell them to leave everyone alone while your at it.  That'd be nice.

Unfortunately for you and me, we don't live in the world of Altered Carbon as far as biotech goes, so I'm sticking with my predictions on the state of play unless I see some kind of seismic shift in the status quo.

[SGR]

Trump up to his old 'Don't call Ted Cruz a pussy' tricks