What I've never understood is how people can get so outraged over even minor political differences. If someone agrees with you 80% then that's an ally, not an enemy.
http://cultresearch.org/help/characteristics-associated-with...
- Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
- The group has a polarized, us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.
- The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group.
- The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and control members. Often this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.
- Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group.
To find out more about what an actual civil war looks like, one might explore history of civil wars in e.g. Russia, China, or even Finland.
I think we Americans are killing each other differently. Nobody has more guns--or gun violence--than we do. We lead the world in mass shootings.
Regarding the civil war part, right now, about 2,000 Americans are dying everyday from COVID-19, where a free and readily available and safe vaccine exists.
We have governors who are essentially part of a pro-COVID death cult, who are complicit in their constituents dying by spreading disinformation against the vaccine, social distancing and masking.
We've allowed a virus in the 21st century to kill more people than a not too dissimilar virus-based pandemic from 1918 did.
That's what sells ads. If you read an article that makes you feel superior to another group of people, like "look what these stupid people are doing," in so many words, that's a hate-monger company. There are many. Fear also sells, and it's a cousin to hate. You can't really have hate without fear. Fear of loss, fear of some unknown boogie man (George Soros, Koch brothers, etc.) It's all to sell advertisements and keep you WATCHING and READING! Pretty sad that is all it takes: money.
The failure modes of the combination of democracy and America-style capitalism are fascinating, as is the reluctance of those with authority to act, to do so.
The American media is both too docile to ask difficult questions (so as to maintain access), while simultaneously riling up viewers' emotions with opinion-shows. Independent media in other western countries do a better job at holding authorities to account - even with something as basic as asking follow-up questions at press-conferences, or pushing back at incorrect characterizations.
A very simple cause and effect that nobody will do anything about because dollarinos.
People in the US may well hate each other more than people in most peaceful developed countries, sure. But “this planet” is a big place.
Instead of bread, it’s shiny disposable gadgets; instead of circuses, it’s the culture wars.
I don't know if that's a new thing or not, but that's how it has seemed to me during this pandemic.
Quite a few people have gone without an easy, safe, miraculously effective vaccine - a marvel of the latest science, freely available at their fingertips - and literally died. As far as I can tell, their deepest motivation to do this was to express their distrust of the establishment and/or stick it to their political opponents.
In a "lol nothing matters" world, all that matters to these people is whether they get to stick it to the man. Nothing bad can really happen, so no real thought is needed to stay safe. It's fine to just believe the first entertainingly outrageous quack theory that flatters your sentiments or ideology or tribe.
It's as if they were interrupted by a gunman while watching TV, and made no motion to defend themselves, assuming the gun pointed at their heads was part of the show.
And for what it's worth, I have some heterodox opinions on certain COVID-related topics. For example the case against ivermectin has been greatly overstated, although there is still room for reasonable doubt about its efficacy.
Not everyone with a streak of independent thought on COVID is a fool, but essentially all the vaccine haters are. Drunk on sentimental nonsense and ideological fantasy, with just enough fact mixed in to make the toxic brew superficially plausible. The 1/6 rioters were much the same.
Is it possible that some are not as equipped as you are to discern the signal within the noise?
Is it possible you are incorrect about one or more of your heterodox opinions?
The type of sneering you're engaging in is unbelievably counterproductive. Uncivilized, even.
It's not just some innocent difficulty with finding the signal in the noise. It's sentimental, ideological delusion, and it's rotten to the core. And deep down, I believe many of them do know better, even if they stopped caring years ago.
I won't pointlessly anger them by saying so to their faces, but I also won't patronize them by pretending otherwise.
I'm ignoring your speculation about me and plan to continue to do so, so let's not bore each other.
In all fairness, my entire qualm with you is the way you've needlessly personalized this discussion. We could have discussed the issues at hand directly. Alas.
The antiviral effects were found in vitro at, if I remember correctly, around 8x the concentration that would be found in typical treatment.
It doesn’t.
I've long thought the best way of reaching 100% vaccination in the US was to have competing Democrat and Republican vaccines. Democrats could don a dashiki and say one thing while Republicans could put up a crack smoking pillow salesman to say another.
That's right. Trump was booed the moment he suggested that his supporters get vaccinated against Covid-19.
Oh, you mean for Covid? We use BioNTech and Moderna for that.
Please stop confusing people on the right with vulnerable uneducated people in general. There are plenty of those on the left and right. Donald Trump does not represent the right. He represents Trumpers. Unfortunately many of those who shape the Republican party are Trumpers. But there are obviously perfectly reasonable people on the right who are not Trumpers.
The ignorant are exploited by both sides. Please be careful to distinguish between the exploiters and the exploited.
His push for vaccine development and encouraging people to get it might be commendable, but they ring hollow and lack effectiveness because of his past stances.
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/09/10/nolte-how...
See also, the impact of claims of voter fraud/rigged elections on Republican turnout in Georgia Senate and the California recall election.
I have a theory that I cannot provide verifiable evidence for, but due to the technical fluency of the readers here I believe it may be interesting to some.
I run a small marketing service that ingests new content submitted to a number of social media sites (colloquially known as “social listening”). We run text analytics on the content, primarily to find marketing opportunities for customers. That system also has very rudimentary checks for “bot” accounts.
Starting in early 2020 there was a massive, massive spike in the number of bot accounts creating and responding to content on reddit. Our system doesn’t “cross-reference” flagged accounts very well, but I manually went through the post history on a few of those accounts and found that many of them had responded with congruent comments to submissions of other flagged accounts.
Furthermore, most of the flagged accounts had a similar pattern in the timing of their posts. Posts and comments were relatively irregular and sporadic near the start of the accounts’s history, indicative of a real user. Then, submissions completely stopped for a number of months. After the pause, the account would resume submissions and comments with far more regularity. The patterns exhibited by those accounts may indicate that they were overtaken and sold in bulk accounts lists for use as bot accounts.
Every account that I checked was posting content with a clear narrative.
I believe these are very large bot networks upvoting and submitting content of a particular nature in order to sway popular discourse and give an appearance of a particular consensus among conversation participants.
The plausibility of my theory has been augmented by the fact that rudimentary software for creating reddit bot networks can be found for sale on various “botting” forums. Furthermore, I was accepted into the OpenAI GPT-3 beta a few months ago; the capabilities of that model have further convinced me of the validity of my theory.
If you have experience with bots, natural language processing, or another related field, please feel free to point out flaws in my theory!
It reminds me heavily of the Dead Internet Theory.
We're living in very different worlds I guess.
Until Donald Trump decided to say covid-19 is a hoax and preventative measures are unnecessary. Presumably because he‘s so contrarian that anything the Democrats supported he opposed and vice versa. It was a dumb move and many (including me) believe it cost him the election, if he decided to support lockdowns I really think he would’ve won by a long shot.
And now it’s too late, since many conservatives got so invested in the fact that covid-19 is fake, and people can’t admit when they’re wrong. I wish liberals were more sympathetic and tried to make it easier for conservatives to accept the vaccine instead of mocking and shaming. But it’s so hard to get people to admit when they’re wrong.
It's interesting that you didn't say "I wish more conservatives would admit they were wrong", but instead put the onus of action on liberals.
It just doesn't excuse some liberals from encouraging this left/right divide and just being nasty. Things like r/HermanCainAward, being proud when vaccine deniers get sick. At least understand that when someone is literally putting themselves in danger, they're not evil or selfish, they're delusional and misinformed.
Minorities (POC, Latinx) have the lowest vaccination rates. Do these groups generally lean conservative?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/health...
Tuskegee was many decades ago. There are much more recent examples of the pharmaceutical industry and doctors prescribing a product to millions of Americans that was later shown to be harmful, at least for some patients. I'm of course referring to Oxycontin and other supposedly "non-addictive" opioids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died as a result of these drugs. Countless more lives stunted or ruined.
In my view, events like this explain a great deal of working-class (including white, who heavily lean Republican) skepticism about novel treatments. Just today, Pfizer issued a complete recall of the anti-smoking drug, Chantix, after discovering it can increase cancer risk:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2021/09/17/cha...
I hope we all can have more empathy for anyone who is skeptical after witnessing or experiencing harm after a incident like this. I'm not saying all fear or skepticism is valid or warranted. Just that I wish people would not judge the individuals involved for their (presumed) politics, and work towards greater education and understanding.
As you've commented (but then hand waved), the motive behind the distrust. "An orange man told me" vs. "The US government has spent hundreds of years oppressing our people, and the US medical system fails minorities consistently time and time again".
Trump has been vaccinated and recommends vaccination. Trump's administration instituted Operation Warp Speed, which supported and expedited vaccines the entire world has benefited from.
At the time, Democrats were busy sewing distrust about it.
It seems that you have trouble viewing things outside of this racial lens. My original comment was in hopes that you would start to consider this in a different light and understand why there perhaps might be race neutral reasons that people are hesitant. The opioid crisis is much closer to what people are afraid of. They're afraid that the vaccines are meant to help, but that they might hurt, at least if they're in a particular age group, or have a particular pre-existing condition, etc.
It's unfortunate that you're not willing to treat this issue and your political opponents with more empathy, but there's nothing I can do about that. At this point, you're pretty obviously downvote baiting me with outrageous comments, waiting eagerly for me to respond, so this is the last I'm going to engage with you.
The argument is about government distrust. I'll skip the rest of your post.
Black is 10.0% of all vaccinated while making up 12.4% of population.
White (non-hispanic) is 61.5% of all vaccinated while making up 61.2% of the population.
So we're talking ~2.4 points behind at worst (stats are from the CDC link in your article). For comparison we're talking about more than a 10 point gap when comparing counties by political affilation. https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covi...
I think you'll find most "liberals" are pretty understanding that militant anti-vaxxers are delusional and misinformed. The issue is less with their delusion and more with the militancy of their delusion and the societal consequences.
If the militant anti-vaxxers instead of being anti-vax were just pro-drinking bleach then the danger of that delusion would be personal. Only idiots drinking bleach would be harmed.
What's happening though is the delusion of the militant anti-vaxxers is causing problems for everyone. They're breaking if they haven't broken hospital systems in many parts of the country, they're a breeding ground for new variants of the virus, and they're actively fighting mitigation measures to contain the spread of the virus in kids who can't be vaccinated.
People that have acted rationally and have socially distanced, worn masks, and gotten vaccinated are being negatively affected every day by delusional sociopaths. These same delusional sociopaths have made every aspect of the pandemic worse.
Why should anyone feel the need to keep coddling them? The militant anti-vaxxers are keeping the pandemic a pandemic, had they gotten fucking vaccines we could have COVID at least partially under control at endemic levels. Their words and actions advertise the fact they are sociopaths. Dealing with them is exhausting and unrewarding.
It's sad that positions on vaccines tracks so closely to political persuasion. At the same time if delusional sociopathy is part and parcel of a so-called political philosophy maybe that suggests a little self-reflection is needed for its proponents.
When we know vaccines still put people at risk why are we not locking everyone down and closing borders?
As far as I know, COVID isn't going to stop spreading around the rest of the world. So as soon as the lockdown in a given country ends, that country will be exposed to it and face the same pandemic they would have faced in the first place. Now, that makes a lot of sense to me if they are facing it with a new tool in hand (like the vaccine), that means a lot fewer people will die than if they'd gone through it with nothing.
But if there is no better treatment coming, what does locking down for 3 months, 6 months, or a year accomplish?
A lot of people are choosing wrong and suffering for it. They had a choice. No one can take that away from them, they always had a choice.
Propaganda only works if you choose to believe it.
For you and me it might be, because we may have the acquired skills to research sources, spot bullshit, etc. We still miss stuff.
But for a lot of people "choosing wrong", it might just be the sum of their environment. A media diet too heavily reliant on Facebook for example.
Ah but they're choosing to stay on Facebook you say... Well, yes, but if they can't directly make the link between Facebook and the propaganda, they don't even know they have a choice to make.
"Free will exists" is a hand wavy way of victim blaming here, imo. There is a reason these people are called victims of propaganda, not willful soldiers.
Everyone has the choice to ask, "but what if they're wrong?" That simple question alone illuminates the incremental path to greater understanding (however long the journey may be). Many of these people who have been enthralled by the narrative that vaccines are dangerous and unnecessary are otherwise normal people. They're able to function in their jobs and day to day life. If they believed everything anyone told them they'd never be able to function in society, and yet they do function. Precisely because they are able to choose who and what to believe; we all do it every day! They choose to never question certain sources or authorities. It's a willful choice.
To be even more clear however, the kinds of people pushing these viewpoints within their community are actually evil and doing it in bad faith for their own self gain. Even the mainstream conservative voices like Tucker Carlson, who is vaccinated and works at an institution with a vaccine requirement, is using his platform to deliberately cast doubt on its efficacy and safety. He knows better, but he is sending the message his supports want to hear. This is evil. Senators who are going out of their way to make sure nobody can be made to wear a mask in certain settings are doing it deliberately for political points and are objectively evil for this.
I don’t fully spite the average person who is listening to and hearing all these voices that align with the rest of their politics and choosing to take the position for no other reason than it’s being fed to them, but there is a limit. And maybe I’m just not aware enough but there is a ton of intentional gritting in the conservative/right-wing space now intentionally pulling on the talking points for a profit motive that I don’t see in left-wing spaces. And that might be okay even, except their also a total scam and bullshit. Selling people a “freedom phone” which is just a rebadge of a cheap Chinese phone (the irony) for a huge markup because it won’t let you be censored. This kind of behavior. Preying on their own audience that they’ve cultivated to specifically exploit them.
There is a lot of evil there.
I don’t think it’s appropriate to dunk on people dying. But it isn’t really surprising that there is that level of response among some people on the left-leaning space. It’s equivalent to the “owning the libs” on the other side. I’m not in for it personally, but I don’t think it’s any more or less popular on either side. Just the general shape of overall disgusting polarization we’re at now.
If people want to live in their own version of reality I don’t care. But when their version of reality is ruining it for the rest of us, it is a problem and there isn’t a lot of room for discussion with someone who isn’t willing to engage with reality.
Are you sure that is a true statement? What exact ruination are you referring to? Are you saying that we would not have had a delta wave in the U.S. if more people had vaccinated? Or that lockdowns would have gone differently? Or schools?
Australia still has a covid problem, despite their lockdowns. Israel is still having covid breakouts, despite their high vaccination rates. It's putting a strain on many health care systems.
What do you think will change if we had closer to 100% vaccine compliance?
> and there isn’t a lot of room for discussion with someone who isn’t willing to engage with reality.
Quite the contrary, there's plenty of room for discussion. You obviously don't understand their point of view. Not everyone thinks the way you do. This ending to your comment struck me as quite dismissive. That's a lot of people you just wrote off.
Where does it leave us if we can't talk about these things, and respect our different values?
While Israel got far out ahead in its vaccination campaign early on, it’s current rate of vaccination isn’t particularly high, still below 65% of the population has completed the full course of vaccinations.
Heard immunity estimates have always been at the 70-85% level, so there’s no reason to believe Israel was immune to such outbreaks, especially with a more virulent variant such as delta. All that matters is whether the replication rate is above or below one, if you don’t have the level of population immunity to keep that R value below one, you will see outbreaks.
As far as people not living in reality, this isn’t even primarily about COVID. It also isn’t a refusal to try and have a discussion on my part. It is what happens when people reject information that doesn’t reflect what they believe. They have written themselves off. You’re right. I don’t understand the point of view of someone who thinks there is a satanic cabal of liberals who prey on children. I don’t understand the point of view of someone who thinks 5G is going to read their minds. I don’t understand the point of view of someone who thinks the vaccine is the mark of the beast. I don’t understand the point of view of, based on various polling, 70-80% of republicans who don’t believe Biden won the election legitimately.
Or rather, I do. Or at least I can see how they got there. But what I can’t do is convince them that these things aren’t true. I can’t convince them that someone on the internet who claimed to be an insider and now hasn’t posted anything in like over a year wasn’t actually able to predict all the future events leading up to Donald Trump being reinstated as president and rounding up all the Democrats and liberals and child abusers. These people have already bought into something that is so far out that there is no reaching them. It isn’t for lack of trying. They aren’t willing or ready to accept anything else.
Eventually some of them will find their way out of it, but that is a place they have to get to on their own before anyone can help them out of it.
To answer your final question, it leaves us in a terrible place and exactly where we are. I don’t enjoy this. I’m not reveling in it. It’s fucking depressing. It’s sad. It’s an actual tragedy. We’re in a bad place and I don’t see that changing or getting better any time soon.
I’ll happily discuss things of this nature with people who don’t agree with my general beliefs but I don’t have a lot of patience for someone, and I’ve interacted with more than a few, who flat out deny things that are objectively recordable, let alone anything subject to interpretation. They closed the door, they shut down the conversation.
On the topic of covid specifically, I think that people have vastly different outlooks on the personal and/or societal risks of dying versus the impact of extended lockdowns. I don't think it is an unreasonable position. It's hard to point at definitive data proving that anything works for certain, there's a lot of confounding factors and surprises in the numbers. Some people can't get past the individual tragedies. Some people only look at the population scale numbers. Some people are more educated than other. Lots of people make up their minds on a hunch, as you said, and look for sources that confirm their biases.
A fascinating book I read called "The Republican Brain" talked about this stuff, theorizing that some of the partisan divide is due to personality differences, that people are born with different feelings about authority, hierarchies, individualism, communitarianism, etc. I was left with the impression that this was an evolutionary advantage as a species, that the variety of ways of thinking makes us better as a group.
I don't think that it's the end of the world that we as a group don't agree on everything. We could celebrate that and support each other in our differences, or at least respect each other. But so many do not, both on the left and on the right. They'd rather win 51% of the vote, and impose their point of view on the losers, winner take all. Mass media and further removing isolating people make the problems worse.
> And we still have a non-trivial segment of the population who can’t get vaccinated (under 12) who are quite literally the victims of people who are largely unvaccinated
You called out some things the other side say that are unreasonable. I think the language you used above is a bit strong, and I'm not sure how much fact vs feeling it is. Not a lot of kids die of covid. It's similar for them to the risk from the flu in other years. And RSV. And the vaccine is not 100% effective, lots of people will still die, just like people die of the common cold every year. It seems unreasonable to draw a "quite literally" connection between the vaccinated and the small amount of kids who die, some every year, from respiratory ailments.
Also there is no country in the world who has a 100% vaccination rate, so maybe it is outside the bounds of human nature to expect that amount of compliance on such a short notice controversial issue? Perhaps it would be better for politics to account for the strong beliefs that large segments of their populations hold? For instance, why haven't we build more hospitals in the last 18 months? Are there better ways to support the vulnerable? What are the numbers used to justify various decisions? Can we admit what we don't know? etc
My comment was about how, if this statement is true, you mostly skipped over it in favor of asking for action out of non-conservatives.
It's not hard. It's insanely not hard. It's so unfathomably not difficult that this comment reads like satire. Walk into any grocery store or pharmacy.
The comment is calling republicans special snowflakes who can't change their minds without being coddled to do so, so they can keep an air of superiority over the liberal degenerates
That's not how it works. At all. Progress in every aspect of political life has come from being pushy, not from coddling.
If Corbyn had won in 2019 (from a higher youth turnout and lower elder turnout), there’s no way the press or the elder demographics would be so accepting, and the country would be polarised with covid as a pivot.
I don't remember it. Because it never happened: https://apnews.com/article/michael-pence-virus-outbreak-dona...
It wasn't until the pandemic was raging in the summer that he wore a mask in public and then quickly stopped doing so. He even put on a show of ripping off his mask after he came back from his Covid hospitalization.
edit Someone already pointed out that this is an obvious biased misinformation post.
I was also very skeptical of the speed at which a vaccine could be created and rolled out. But, once it was rolled out and it was shown to be reasonably safe, certainly far safer than actually getting COVID, I went and got the jab. These are not hypocritical or diametrically opposed viewpoints and actions. They are the behaviors of someone living in reality, with all of the uncertainty that entails.
Exactly this.
Which is why I remain skeptical. My elderly father had a massive stroke 3 days after receiving the second shot, which was administered right after he recovered from covid, which he contracted after the first shot.
I'm also certain his care givers did not report this to the FDA's voluntary MedWatch database, which is the only way the government is tracking adverse events.
I also recognize ad hominem arguments.
In Berlin, you could see graffitis such as "we will vaccinate you all!" or "covid deniers out". If there was any way to measure it, I'd bet that the net effect of that is negative.
Maybe because data started showing that masks aren’t reducing infections? Or Gavin Newsome and London Breed partying like rock stars without masks.
Or the Met Gala where only the servants wore masks?
Or the data (from schools,) that show the masks weren’t affecting infection rates?
Or Fauci saying “no” privately? Then yes publicly? Or the insanity of people wearing masks when driving alone in their car? Or running in the woods?
Nothing about mask policy has been sane.
The Law always provokes its opposite.
For some definitions of "law" this is probably true. But I think under the more general principle it's much more likely to happen than not. If you look at the law as any set of rules, you find that they generally accuse you (it is not the subjunctive mood, but the imperative that is the mood of least reality): why do I have to tell my kids to wash their hands after going to the bathroom? Because they don't. It's the law of hand-washing. (For a more humorous take, Gary Larsen forever immortalized the idea with the alarm + light over the men's room.)
COVID's hand-washing suggestions are the grown-up version. And the way my kids resent it when I tell them to go back and wash their hands is not much different than the way some of my otherwise reasonable co-workers reacted. Of course not everyone reacted this way, but if the messaging were somewhat different I wouldn't be surprised to have found compliance higher.
Law is always paired with a consequence. For my kids, it's a short trip back to the washroom and possibly a haranguing depending on whether I'm extra irritable. For our society, it's sometimes death and/or being subjected to schadenfreude (haha, stupid rednecks took ivermectin and not only poisoned themselves but also died of COVID).
YMMV, but I have found this basic principle explains a lot: the law always accuses, and it always provokes its opposite. Moreover, people are really good at hearing law even if that's not the intent of the speaker. Communicating is hard.
A friend was a climbing instructor for awhile, and she related that when teaching people who were scared of heights to climb that the phrase "don't look down" (the law of "don't look down") was verboten. Instead, the command was "keep looking up." The difference between the two phrases was illuminating.
When the law says, 'separate your plastics and glass for recycling', not many people intentionally start mixing them. When it tells businesses to pay minimum wage, they don't cut wages further below the new minimum. Most people think of most laws as reasonable.
Yes, it needs to be communicated effectively. If you attack people, they feel unsafe and get defensive. Most law is very dry reading, not accusatory or emotional. And very few people read the actual laws.
Surprising how easy it is to fracture American society then.
(And yes, conservatives who believe Obama was the sole source of division are also out of touch. People really need to try to understand the other side).
It was like a mirror image of Trump's election in 2016.
While personally I preferred Obama (as a non-US citizen) it's really sad how much anger and rage is expressed over these political differences.
Personally I think gerrymandering is the proximate cause, as it creates more safe districts for party members, which allows them to be more extreme than would be acceptable in a more competitive district.
I remember back in 2016, when all the Trump/Putin brouhaha first started making rounds, one staunch right-winger whom I know said something along the lines of, "if Putin helps him hang all our traitors and clean the trash out like he did in Russia, I'm all for it".
> right-wing crazies
Seems to be a bit hypocritical, no?
Covid19 is a religion. You cannot question religions. It's also not a problem until something goes beyond.
>I'm in a big American city, and I remember that until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn't as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies.
Until it became a religion. Those right-wing crazies are religious seeing it as religion vs religion.
Compared to the flu seasons, which we go get a shot and then do nothing else. Covid for ages 25-35 is 40 times less likely to harm you compared to the regular flu season.
If you are 25-35, you go get the shot and then stop giving a shit about covid because it's virtually no risk. By all measures soon as the covid shot was available. You offer it as the flu shot and tell people to get it and you go back to flu season measures. Which is basically nothing.
Yet I know how many people who will drive 100km/h in a school zone are scared shitless by covid. The risk mismatch is not because of actual risk but rather because it's a religion. Morality tells them they need to be scared.
>It reminded me of the time people were worried about pollutants causing hormonal changes in indicator species, and then Alex Jones started talking about how "they're turning the frogs gay" and the meaningful version of that discourse vanished too.
There are 9 confirmed estrogens in our drinking water. Especially true of salt-water coastal cities. Hence why you pretty much MUST have water filtration.
How well would society function if we were doing mass hormone replacement therapy on everyone? Would people start being far more likely to be gay frogs or trans or just emotional messes like typical HRT symptoms. Especially if you aren't aware HRT is occurring. Why the huge increase in trans people? Is it because of these estrogens in our drinking water? Nestle and others approve though.
> It's made me wary of the sport of finding what crazy things my political enemies believe to make fun of them, because it seems like the net effect of this is creating "opposite" erroneous beliefs with no evidence
We are on this world together. Finding 'crazy things' or trying to start fights by calling people names does not benefit anyone.
No test necessary. I can guarantee you 100% you have more than 1 estrogen in your tap water. Also multiple kinds of antibiotics, anticonvulcants, mood stabilizers.
The majority of estrogens in the water will be estriol, estrone, and estradiol. If you're salt water coastal where they keep that water around for long. You will also have equilenin, progesterone, and lots of BPA.
If you have wondered why filtering your water is important and why there's so many filtration options its because of this.
Democracy is nice, but historically it leads to very bad outcomes in a few hundred years. What remains to be seen is whether or not this democracy will sustain itself.
Never in history have people been more free, had more economic self-determination, and been more safe and had more peace - for billions in every part of the world. What other system of government has even approached it?
This is just magical thinking. It's the same thinking behind the magical forms of american exceptionalism
Democacies are indeed young so I don't get your point that it will lead to something "very bad".
Look.... I believe in democracy, but I don't have a religious fervor over it. I am shocked when my fellow Americans seem so unschooled in basic history. Indeed, many of the undemocratic things put into our constitution (like the much maligned electoral college) were put there by our founders hoping to avoid the pitfalls of democracy. They were very aware that democracy typically fails spectacularly, and put in many anti-democratic things into the constitution to avoid it.
Contrary to that England is a parliamentary democracy for nearly 200 years now and the monarch only has a representative role.
But on that account every form of governance has failed. How many autocracies and monarchies have failed? In that case it isn't because of fundamental flaws and had other reasons?
I don't think the US constitution is full of anti-democratic rules at all. On the contrary, its intent is to grant rights.
People make statements like this and I can only hope they're not american, because the idea you could be educated in an american school and come out believing this is too horrifying to ponder.
Our founders directly stated in contemporaneous documents their fear of unchecked democracy and how it can descend into tyranny.
There is a natural conflict between democracy (and any form of government) and individual rights.
The founders sought to create a republic (not even a democracy really) with heavy protections for individual rights which they saw as at risk from democratic forces
That you think individual rights and democracy are intertwined is only because of bad history linking the american constitution to some great creation story of democracy itself. Many democracies have been authoritarian nightmares for those in the minority
Some Americans wanted a monarchy after the civil war, but they still wanted individual rights protected. Democracy won out but not because of its human rights record. Indeed, the founders were familiar with democratic tyranny based on their classical studies.
The examples of the natural misalignment between democracy and human rights are numerous. Slavery, Jim crow laws, drug laws, all of which were highly popular in their day or are popular now, but agree or disagree obviously curtail individual rights.
Now to your points.... No the Roman republic was not at all like north Korea. The Roman republic was an actual republic, with elections, power transfers etc.
England has been a monarchy for a thousand years and still is. Parliament is a nice thingy but the queen can get rid of it if she wants and she knows that. That's why they behave themselves most of the time. In fact she did this in recent memory in Australia.
All governments fail, but some fail faster and more spectacularly than others.
(I don't have time to give you every thing said by the founders on the danger of democracy and it's nTueal tension with individual rights... Here's a good starting point https://finance.townhall.com/columnists/jimhuntzinger/2018/1...)
I'm in a big American city, and I remember that until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn't as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies.
I remember when there was that controversy about 5G networks interfering with bird migration patterns and meteorology, but as the fringe conspiracy crowd started spinning up crazy theories about how 5G was going to brainwash or sterilize or force-feminize people over the airwaves or whatever it was, most people I knew stopped talking about it, seemed to forget that they had ever thought it concerning. It reminded me of the time people were worried about pollutants causing hormonal changes in indicator species, and then Alex Jones started talking about how "they're turning the frogs gay" and the meaningful version of that discourse vanished too.
I view the same kind of thing as happening here, as well as a lot of other places. It's made me wary of the sport of finding what crazy things my political enemies believe to make fun of them, because it seems like the net effect of this is creating "opposite" erroneous beliefs with no evidence