Title is pretty self explanatory, but I fear that many Democratic politicians and their supporters may have overplayed their hands with the Epstein files. It's taken for granted that Trump and his administration have blocked the release of all the files to protect themselves and their allies. They are regularly called pedophiles themselves or protectors of pedophiles.

Well if that's the case, then the next Democratic administration has no way to avoid the same criticism if they don't release what Trump has kept back. And if they use the same excuses that the Trump administration uses (e.g. protecting victims), then those excuses must be criticized equally.

The discourse has largely been to release ALL the files. If democratic supporters (and, to be fair, many anti-MAGA republicans) don't continue this demand once a democrat is in office, they are hypocrits.

(To balance the view, briefly: anyone who has supported Trump in blocking the release of the files has no ground to stand on to demand the next administration release them)

Edit: I should add to me view a clarification that my personal opinion is that everything relevant in the files is already out in the open. Trump and republicans way over-promised, expecting to find a sophisticated network of a global pedophile ring, but rather found a pretty small operation that got a few underage girls to one degenerate, Epstein. There is no additional prosecutable information in the files.

Of course when talking to someone in real life we don't get to know or need to know their communication history, but that is not the topic, the topic is interaction/discussion on Reddit. Because there are so many argumentative tricks (sea lioning) for example, bots or general trolls, in any discussion I'm bound to respect a person more who is open with their Reddit activity than someone who isn't. The rest of what I'm writing is to fulfill the 500 character base limit for posts so that my post will be posted

Edit - this is my first CMV ever - I'm overwhelmed by the replies! I awarded one delta - I'm out. Thanks folks

First, what I'm NOT arguing, because I hear these all the time:

1. I'm not arguing Fahrenheit was designed for human comfort. It wasn't. Fahrenheit built his scale around brine solutions and body temperature to calibrate instruments in the 1720s. But Celsius wasn't designed for weather either. It was built around water's phase changes, which matter to chemists, not to someone deciding what to wear. Neither scale was designed for weather. The question is which one happens to fit that job better.
2. I'm also not arguing anyone should switch. Yes, I am aware the one you grew up with will always be more efficient to you.
3. I'm not defending imperial. I'm metric for basically everything: kilometers, kilograms, liters, Celsius for cooking and science. I hold exactly one exception for exactly one purpose: Fahrenheit for weather.

Ok, how here is my explanation as to why I believe this:

1. Humans most commonly live in environments roughly around the range of -20F to 110F (-28.9C to 43.3C). This just happens to perfectly map on the 0-100 Fahrenheit scale. 0F is dangerously code, 100F is dangerously hot. 50F is chilly. "It's in the 90s" is inferable from human experience. On the other hand, Celsius's range of 0-100 goes from "cold day" to "you are dead." Only the bottom anchor point (0C = freezing) has anything to do with weather but boiling is irrelevant. Sure, people learn over time in Celsius that 30s is hot, 20s is nice, 0 freezing, etc...but that's through experience and memorization rather than the intuitiveness of the scale itself.
2. Humans experience about 130 Fahrenheit degrees of weather but only about 72 Celsius degrees of it. That's around 80% more whole-numbers without touching decimals. And 1C is a change most people can actually feel (it's 1.8F, right around the threshold where people notice air temperature differences), so Celsius integers are at or above what you can perceive, while Fahrenheit integers sit below it. A Celsius user rounds two temperatures they could physically tell apart into the same "22C"
3. If you were to design a measurement scale from scratch specifically for how humans respond to temperature/weather, and you knew nothing about existing systems, what would you build? My guess is it would look way closer to Fahrenheit than to Celsius.

The most common arguments I hear:

1. "I've never needed a decimal." You've just gotten used to generalizing and accepting broader ranges. That's a fact about habit, not about the scale.
2. "Switching gives me no benefit." True, and irrelevant. Nobody who writes dates as MM/DD/YYYY gets any benefit from switching to YYYY-MM-DD (ISO), and YYYY-MM-DD is still obviously the better designed format (sorts as text, unambiguous, big to small). No benefit to switching and worse designed for the purpose can both be true at the same time.

Things I'll concede up front so nobody wastes time on them:

• Celsius wins for science, cooking, and anything involving water.
• 0C = freezing is genuinely useful for weather (icy roads). This is Celsius's one real weather advantage. I just don't think it beats my other points
• In practice, familiarity swamps everything and nobody should switch. This is an argument about which scale is better designed for the job, not about what anyone should do.

What would change my view: convince me the range and resolution stuff doesn't actually matter for talking about weather, show me weather-specific Celsius advantages beyond the freezing point, or show me that 1C granularity is actually fine for everything people care to communicate about weather and my perception argument is wrong. You should be able to prove the scale itself is better designed than Fahrenheit.

What won't: "everyone I know uses Celsius just fine" (habit, not design), "Fahrenheit's original reference points were arbitrary" (so were Celsius's), or "the rest of imperial sucks" (agreed, irrelevant).

For some reason, so many people in-person and online swear Celsius is better at Fahrenheit beyond just familiarity. So I want to know what I'm missing.

This is one of those patterns I've observed on this site, that you have these generically named accounts that basically follow this pattern of constant posting on some sports team (Or sometimes another hobby, but its usually sports), showing no signs of any political engagement, and then, all of a sudden, they will come out hard to attack one specific candidate (Always one hated by corporations or the establishment and in a politically contentious situation like an election or primary).

To me, this is pretty good evidence that these are accounts being sold on reddit after being properly farmed up with karma so it looks like they are legit. Does anyone have anything to the contrary that might poke holes in my theory?

I teach philosophy at the secondary school level. This year, my colleague and I redesigned our final oral exam, so that instead of testing whether students could recite arguments from the syllabus, we asked them to reason live, in conversation, about a question connected to their own essay — with follow-up questions built specifically to probe whether they actually understood the concepts or had just memorized the shape of a good answer.

The results made me rethink something I'd mostly taken for granted about grading.

One student came in visibly convinced she'd bombed it — she second-guessed her own thesis mid-conversation, revised her position out loud when we raised a strong counterargument, and left the room sure she'd failed. She got one of the best scores in the class. Not because she "knew more" than everyone else, but because she demonstrated the actual skill we were supposedly trying to teach: updating a position in response to a good argument instead of defending endlessly, just because that was their original position.

Another student, on paper, "answered correctly" — but only because a weaker essay meant we asked her more content-recall questions and fewer reasoning ones. She'd genuinely studied hard and gave us facts, but there was less evidence that she could actually do anything with those facts under pressure. She got a fine grade. I'm honestly not sure it measured the same thing as the first student's grade.

My view: most grading — including a lot of what I did myself for years — actually rewards two different things and treats them as one:

1. Retention and reproduction of material ("did you study")
2. The ability to reason, revise, and construct an argument in real time ("can you think")

These correlate, but not as tightly as we pretend. A student can be excellent at (1) and mediocre at (2), and still walk away with a grade that looks identical to a student who's the reverse. If the actual goal of an education is producing people who can reason well — which I'd argue is the entire point of something like philosophy, but honestly applies more broadly — then a grading system that can't reliably distinguish those two things is measuring the wrong thing, or at best measuring both and reporting them as one number.

Change my view. Genuinely open to being told this is naive, unworkable at scale, or that I'm undervaluing what "well-studied" actually indicates.

Why do we continue to coddle children? I don't mean coddle by protect, but coddling in the form of shielding. A lot of people will hide their kids from cuss words, gay people, sex etc. I don't understand why people think their kid will never hear a cuss word.

Kids go to school. Their peers cuss. You just have to teach your kids not to do it, but to hide them from the words has no point. The same with gay people. A lot of parents don't want their kids exposed to gay people. They treat them like aliens and want their kids to do the same.

The same with sex. I learned about it in fourth grade from a peer. My mom waited until I was 13-14 to really have that conversation with me. By then, it was too late.

There's nothing wrong with children knowing that there are all walks of life in this world. Gay people are not aliens and they aren't harmful. Those same parents who shield their kids from gay people, are the same ones whose kids will grow up hating or harassing them.

There's also nothing wrong with kids knowing how babies are made. But definitely teach them not to spread it to their peers lol. My mom would've had a fit if she found out about that mini lesson I got.

I just don't understand the need to shield kids from things that they will soon find out about. One day, they'll hear cuss words and they'll see gay people.

Intentional or not, it often operates as a vote-baiting tactic. Redditors frequently upvote those posts just to prove the commenter wrong. So top-voted comments often start with "I know this will be downvoted but..." This is a form of vote-baiting and should be discouraged.

Next, it shifts the focus away from the actual argument and onto the meta-drama of Reddit voting karma before the reader has even digested the point. It seriously increases the noise to signal ratio.

Next, it sets up a win-win shield for the commenter's ego. If they get downvoted, they get to feel vindicated ("See? I knew the hivemind couldn't handle the truth!"). If they get upvoted, they feel like a brave truth-teller who defied the ododds.

My view is:

Regardless of the content of what a person is saying, starting your post or comment with "I'll be downvoted for this but...." deserves a downvote for the stated reasons.

​

I believe that the only way to escape depression is to feel again. When we look at people who suffer from depression, many of them seem to have weak social connections, to become isolated, to grow up in oppressive or loveless families, and to gradually fall into a monotonous life. Their lives can become trapped in repetitive cycles: waking up, going to school or work, coming home, doing chores, sleeping, and repeating the same routine the next day. When every day begins to feel exactly the same, a person can slowly become disconnected from the world and even from themselves. There is little novelty, little excitement, and sometimes nothing that gives them a reason to truly look forward to tomorrow. Eventually, nothing seems to truly matter anymore. They begin to feel as if they are losing their emotions, and a deep emptiness starts to grow inside them.
I believe that one of the strongest things that can stand against this emptiness is to feel something intensely.
Human beings do not live only through happiness and peace. Pain, fear, excitement, struggle, and risk are also parts of the human experience. When someone has never truly experienced pain, perhaps they cannot fully understand the meaning of happiness or gratitude either. Sometimes, in order to feel alive again, a person needs to come face to face with the intensity of life.
This is why experiences that create fear and adrenaline can be important. It does not necessarily have to be fighting or physical violence. It can be anything that carries real risk, pushes a person beyond their comfort zone, and forces them to experience intense emotions. When a person is truly afraid, their attention becomes completely focused on the present moment. For a while, the past and the future disappear. There is only the present.
Perhaps this is one of the greatest problems of modern life. As people build safer and more comfortable lives, they gradually distance themselves from the intensity of existence. When everything is under control, a person may feel safe, but at the same time, they may begin to feel as though they are no longer truly feeling anything. Monotony can slowly numb a person.
This is where I find Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy particularly relevant. The Dionysian is about embracing the uncontrollable and chaotic side of life. It means accepting fear, pain, passion, ecstasy, and struggle not as enemies of life, but as parts of life itself. Instead of living a life consisting only of order and security, a person should experience the full intensity of existence.
Perhaps what human beings need is not to suffer, but to feel something.
To be afraid, to become excited, to struggle, to experience joy, to lose, to win… All of these things can remind us that we are alive. Sometimes, a person may find meaning in life not by thinking about it, but by actually living it with intensity.
Because perhaps the greatest fear a human being can have is not suffering, but living without ever feeling anything at all.

View:

1. Irradiation of foods that will be eaten raw provides some protection from pathogens, such as e coli & cyclospora.
2. While not foolproof, that additional line of defense is affordable and could make a meaningful positive impact on public health.
3. The main reason radiation is seldom used to enhance food safety is because of distrust of science among a minority of the general public.
4. Other nations use irradiation of produce more than the U.S. and consequently have fewer outbreaks of diseases from raw produce, such as e coli & cyclospora.
5. Radiation of food is better for public health than chemical treatments of food, due to the environmental impact of chemical [production] & disposal, as well as effects of trace amounts that remain on food.

What would change my view.

A) Evidence that there are more cost effective interventions that would make comparable improvements to food safety.

B) Evidence that food safety isn't something we should care about.

C) Evidence that irradiation is a paper tiger, that doesn't work.

D) Other evidence or arguments not based on voodoo.

I am not Indian nor do I seek to say there are not serious problems in India. Just that it seems a lot of criticism is based on prejudice.

We’ve all seen the videos of YouTubers travelling to India to comment on how bad it is, taking videos of garbage, unhygienic street food stalls or worse.

However the amount of negative focus India gets to me seems disproportionate.

Yet India rarely starts wars of aggression, immigrants from there to the west are overwhelmingly legal and it is a relatively free nation for the region.

Brazil has slums like India does, large parts of the world have worse poverty, the murder rate is higher in America and yet people feel comfortable using racial slurs like ‘Pajeet’ for Indians that they would never use for other nations or ethnic groups.

Not to mention people judging strange (local not national) Indian festivals or beliefs by Abrahamic religion standards as gross or disgusting yet excusing local weird traditions (like poop disc throwing in rural America) as whimsical.

Is the level of critisim of India justified? Or is this as I suspect a racism which ha a become acceptable?

I do not expect every citizen to understand every law in detail. It is normal for a country to rely on experts and institutions that are capable of handling complex issues.
But there comes a point where that complexity weakens democracy.

Citizens may have the right to vote. But if they do not know who made an important decision, why it was made, or how it can be challenged, are they really participating in the system that governs them?

Accountability is often divided among several institutions. The government may blame an independent agency. An agency may say that it is simply enforcing the law. Political leaders may point to a court ruling or an international agreement.
Each explanation may be partly true. But the result remains the same: no one seems fully responsible.

This also creates an imbalance. Large corporations can afford to pay experts to understand how the system works. They know where the real power lies and how to influence it.

I am not saying that every decision should be put directly to a popular vote. I simply believe that an ordinary citizen should be able to understand the basics. They should know what was decided. They should also know who made the final decision and who has the power to reverse it.

Maybe elections are enough. Maybe journalism and judicial oversight already provide sufficient safeguards. I am open to that possibility.

But as things stand, citizens cannot clearly identify the people making the most important decisions. They are simply choosing representatives within a system they no longer understand.

Change my view.

Disclosure: I used AI assistance to help prepare and revise this post. The final position and most of the wording are my own.

Everyone is still talking about lines on a map, but this war ended the moment Ukraine's demographic foundation collapsed. ​Let's be real about what's left on the ground. Millions of women and kids packed up and left for Europe, and they aren't coming back. Add the staggering number of men lost, and the actual human engine of the country is gone. You can't rebuild an economy, run a society, or sustain a nation when the people simply aren't there anymore. ​The West keeps pretending that another aid package or a new weapons shipment is going to magically reverse a demographic ghost town. It won't. Russia has the strategic depth, the war economy, and the sheer human mass to outlast a country that's running out of citizens. ​We're just watching the slow motion aftermath of a foregone conclusion because nobody wants to admit the strategy failed now don't get me wrong I'm not russian or anything in fact I'm half Ukrainian but I just want people of reddit to realize this this was a war of attrition, and ukraine lost. ​Change my view because I genuinely want it to be changed even though I can't see anyone commencing me .

We use many metaphors subconsciously in our language every day. Particularly, we often mention the chronological order of events in terms of spatial directions such as 'before' and 'after', which means 'front' and 'back' respectively. Since 'before' always means 'earlier' and 'after' always means 'later' in many languages, humans are more inclined to picture events within the order from the 'back' future to the 'front' past than the opposite way. Namely,

• √ (back) future --> present --> past (front)
• × (back) past --> present --> future (front)

I will justify my view in terms of primitive intuition and everyday language use:

First, many words related to earlier time have roots related to the original meaning of 'front'. Notice that the word 'past' itself looks like the past participle (e.g. done) of the verb 'pass', which means to move an object through a spot. Imagine a race of sprint: if sprinter A is in front of B and running at the same speed of B, A will reach to and pass by the finish line earlier than B will. This is illustrated by the following:

• (start) >-- B ---- A -- | --> (finish)
• (start) >-- B -- | -- A --> (finish)

If a running track, sprinters and the finish line are analogous to a timeline, single moments and the moment of present respectively, we can see that earlier moments with smaller numbers are 'in front of' later moments with bigger numbers because an earlier moment will ‘reach to’ and 'pass by' the moment of present earlier than a later moment will do (sounds like a tautology, doesn't it?). Thus, humans naturally establish time models where the past is placed 'in front of' the future. As a result, historians practically record moments once they pass by the moment of present, so earlier moments are naturally arranged in front of later ones in a chronicle.

Second, my understanding of time fits the primitive notion of speed quite well. Remember that the speed of an object is defined to be the ratio of the distance over which the object moves to the duration of time taken by the object. Namely,

• Speed = Distance / Time

Since the faster object will eventually be in front of the slower one, the faster object takes less time to travel over a certain distance. Imagine we are doing a task, and a supervisor is inspecting our progress. The supervisor can record the time taken by each of us to finish the task and then arranges these numbers in the order of speed.

• (slow) ∞ >-- 3 -- 2 --1 --> 0 (fast)

If I am the one in rank 2 and I finish (present tense) the task now, the person in rank 1 'finished' (past tense) the task earlier in 'advance' and the person in rank 3 is left 'behind' and 'will finish' (future tense) the task later. Compare this picture to the picture of the sprint race discussed in the first paragraph, they are identical. Therefore, events occurring in the past are 'in front of' events occurring in the future even in the sense of spatial progression: we walk to the front in the future, but we are left behind the people already there.

Last, since I am a native Chinese speaker, I feel that my understanding of time perfectly fits everyday Chinese due to my relativistic view of spacetime. In Chinese, we have the words '过去' (past) and ‘未来’ (future). Literally, '过' means 'pass', '去' means 'go', '未' means 'not' and '来' means 'come'. Both '过去' and '未来' give a figurative image of time evolution of events:

• (后, back) 'not come yet'--> border checkpoint --> 'pass and go' (先, front)

Border officers met visitors who passed and went to the front, but they will meet visitors who will come from the back. Giving more examples in Chinese, some pairs of antonyms like '祖先' (ancestor) and '后裔' (descendant) carry the meaning that 'front' people were born earlier. The pair like '先进' (advanced) and '落后' (backward) carry the meaning that 'front' thinkers accept innovative or revolutionary notions earlier.

However, I observe that some phrases like 'go back to the past' and 'look forward to the future' sound more natural in many English ears than the opposite way. I am glad to take any valuable input and open to change my current view to any degree.

I am of the viewpoint that there should be a very basic minimum test implemented on parents to permit the biological conception of a child.

We have adoption test - which check for home suitability, criminal background, and financial capability to ensure that the adoptive parents meet a certain threshold.

I believe a similar concept could be applied. To be clear, this wouldn’t be designed to eliminate 50% of potential parents, but be a low bar litmus test that would really only be flagged in extreme cases where these parents would likely be terrible to start (for example a person charged with pedophilia or an unemployed couple with a mountain of debt).

The biggest issue obviously would be enforcement and what would happen in the result of “accidents.” Yes, I do think that this would be difficult, but some combination of of automatic child monitoring and potential threat of child protection services (until they can prove they pass the litmus test) would be enough of a nuisance in place to deter bad actors.

EDIT: Please don't feel attacked. It is simply a neutral discussion. I am also gay myself and I don't mind discussing the nature of my own sexual orientation. If you feel offended or think this topic isn't important, I'm sorry, but please extend the respect that people should show one another.

If you're willing to change my views with reasoned discussion, I'd be genuinely glad. I appreciate people who are willing to examine ideas openly and explore every perspective.

EDIT2: "Deviation" simply describes a difference or a variation from the norm; it does not, by itself, imply that something is good or bad.

EDIT5: Someone recommend me "diverge" is a better word here. (I am not native speaker, so I am sorry if deviation sounds offensive, I mean no harm anyway)

Hi everyone. I am not a native English speaker, so if my words are not accurate, I apologize in advance.

First of all, I am a gay man. I am not ashamed of it. I simply feel neutral about it. I don't have any intention of trying to become straight as I believe that's impossible.

Second, I am atheist. So this post is not about labelling homosexuality as a sin.

I believe the reason homosexuality is a deviation is this: If homosexuality were a normal developmental sexual orientation, then within the gay community, the number of people who are attracted to each other and can pair up should be roughly balanced, allowing for natural pairing. However, based on my personal experience as a gay man, I have observed that the majority of gay men tend to be more feminine. In fact, when someone says they are gay, it is usually not surprising because it is often observable — the so-called "gaydar."

But what I have found — and this is an undeniable fact — is that most gay men are generally more attracted to masculine, straight-acting men rather than feminine ones. As a result, in the gay world, it is more difficult to achieve the kind of balanced 50-50 pairing that is common in the heterosexual world.

EDIT3:

In movies they often choose straight men to play gay characters. Both Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer are straight men in real life.

In dating apps, a lot of gay men saying they are NOT into feminine men, but you rarely see people saying they are NOT into masculine men.

On gay forums like LPSG, the guys who are praised and desired by many gay men are usually masculine looking, straight acting men, not feminine men.)

EDIT4:

"Why do you believe this?"

Because if homosexuality is norm, not deviation, then gay men should be mutually attracted to each other. In terms of numbers, there should be a balance. But gay men are usually attracted to masculine traits which are found in heterosexual men and a minority of gay men. This leads to an imbalance of pairing in the gay community.

From a scientific and objective perspective, the attraction between men and women exists primarily for the purpose of reproducing the next generation. Although this may sound like the story of Adam and Eve, it is indeed a fundamental requirement of natural reproduction. Without attraction, there would be no reproduction. In contrast, same-sex attraction does not lead to reproduction. I know that technology now makes it possible, but that is irrelevant to the discussion of sexual orientation itself.

EDIT6:

A comment asking:"Is there some person out there arguing being gay is the default? Thats the opposite of your view, correct?"

Yes, default is a better word than the norm or normal. If you are born a male or female, it is a default setting that you should be attracted to the opposite sex. The sexual attraction serves a purpose of reproduction. Homosexuals don't lead to reproduction. That's why I think homosexual is a diverge, deviation.

Note: Although scientists have not yet fully explained the causes of homosexuality, one of the leading theories is the prenatal hormone theory. It suggests that gay men may have been exposed to lower levels of androgens (male hormones) during fetal velopment in the womb, while lesbians may have been exposed to higher levels of androgens. This could explian why many gay men tend to exhibit more feminine traits.

While I am biased against horror movies, I do actually enjoy some of them. I like classic franchises like Alien and Scream, and newer ones like A Quiet Place and The Last of Us. Most of the others I find to be disturbing simply for the sake of being disturbing but nothing too offensive, however, Terrifier as a series is one that takes the cake for me.

Where Terrifier differs from other series in my opinion is how it treats its victims. In other horror movies, there is at least an attempt to give more evil characters worse deaths, and spare harsher punishments for innocents, and when innocents do die it is seen as sad or disturbing. Terrifier does not do this. Art the clown does not target bad guys, in fact, he usually targets the most innocent, harmless people and gives them the most drawn out, disturbing deaths possible.

These deaths often are targeted towards young girls, and are in some cases hold very sexual undertones. In one, a young woman is sawed in half while topless (allegedly against the actress's written consent) in front of her close friend. In another, a young teenage girl is undressed and tortured and mutilated for minutes straight, all while flashing to photos of her as a young girl, and then her mother gets to walk in and watch her daughter be killed in front of her. Mind you, all of this is for the crime of... nothing.

Characters die for the sake of dying. There is no plot to this movie. This movie exists for one reason and that is to watch young teenagers be sexually abused or tortured or murdered.

Ultimately, I believe that these films are not produced for normal people, and I especially do not believe that the director/writer is a normal person who holds normal, undisturbed thoughts. Looking through what fans of this franchise have said, it appears as many of them do not view it even as horror, as they basically laugh and giggle as these young girls are tortured and gored. Because of the content of the films and the majority of the fans of the series seems to be completely unphased by it and simply find it amusing, I don't think they watch it for the element of horror, and simply just get pleasure of watching this stuff.

Many countries hold strongly negative opinions of the United States, yet large numbers of their citizens continue to leave those countries and immigrate to the U.S., both legally and illegally. That contradiction matters. If America is truly as oppressive, broken, or undesirable as they claim, why are so many people willing to leave their homes, cross borders, and take significant risks to build a life here?

Criticism of the United States is fair, but countries that cannot offer their own citizens comparable safety, freedom, stability, or opportunity are in a weak position to lecture America. When people consistently vote with their feet by choosing the United States, that choice carries more weight than the rhetoric of the governments and societies they are leaving.

This is an extreme take but didn’t know how to word it better. There was a recent controversy where a very woke white liberal platformed a white supermacist and then dragged a poc instead of apologising when people questioned her about it. This supports my theory that all white liberal shedding tears over racism and white privilege over social media are just grifters using these topics for views and engagement and don’t actually care about pocs.

1. They literally have no skin in the game. The white supermacists can take over and they will continue living the same life. Racism can never affect a white person. White privilege benefits them immensely so their dedication to the cause of eliminating white privilege is questionable.

2. It is easy content for them. People listen to white people when they talk and it’s easy to talk about something that doesn’t hurt you personally. With social media mostly being liberal they find easy audience also. And the right wing takeover of the world gives them ample of content.

3. They are white before they are liberal. It takes a lot of conscious effort to not center your identity in the way you act. Like the liberal who platformed the white supermacist it was not a big deal for her as their white identity made it easier for them to talk. As they can never experience the world as a poc, even if they try their best they’ll hurt pocs with some actions.

4. If these many woke white people were actually doing things irl the world would have been much better. If they were actually using their privilege, so many pocs would not be getting murdered in the open.

To change my view, show that these white liberal have good non-moral or emotional reasons for their views and their support for these causes which isn’t just about views on social media.

Before colleges gave loans, schools had no choice to charge you an amount you could pay out of pocket. Tuition stayed pretty much the same for decades, only really increasing as living standards.

This is why Boomers talk about how when they were young they worked a summer or winter job to afford tuition. Or just paid there way through school. Because it was doable.

I think it was LBJ's ass that started offering loans. I think he meant well. But, as is the problem with a lot of government interference policy, the problem didn't manifest until it's too politically unpopular to end it. And it empowers the rich against the middle class.

So in other words, if you were going to college in the 60-80s, you had no worries.

But, towards the 2000s, here it came.

Universities realized if they inflate prices, students would be forced to take loans. Some of which obviously covers tuition/room/board but the remaining goes to the school, which they used for things unrelated to education like nonsense courses, inefficient programs, Equinox-style gyms, lazy rivers, gourmet-dining halls, Starbucks on campus, and dorms nicer than my first apartment.

Instead of students paying a fixed amount each semester, they've made a racket out of keeping them on 10, sometimes 20-year payment plans, which delays adulthood. That's only undergrad. A JD for instance and some competitive MBA programs can put you in even more debt.

If the government said they will no longer offer loans, the transition would be rough but prices would drop around 50 percent, in the sweet spot of where students can pay out of pocket, and parents wouldn't have to dig into life savings and delay retirement.

Dating is better and more efficient and people are expecting certain standards that are a net positive for society.

Divorce rates have gone down since the 80s and 90s for younger people (below 50), while they've stayed the same for people above 50.

When people say "dating is harder now" they are longing for a time when people knew less about what they wanted/needed and accepted less to conform to societal ideals, only to divorce later because of mismatched persons involved.

Yes, finding your person is "harder" than ever, because it is more efficient. Most 'good' things in life take effort, this is no different.

People bring up a thousand things that they think are to blame that simply are not.

Every farmer with a greenhouse knows that when you add CO2 to your greenhouse, & remove most of the plants/ start new growth, it gets way hotter.

We started out with just a few factories at the start of the industrial revolution, and have built more & more ever since. Increased CO2 output.

We started with most of the planet covered in trees & have cut them at an alarming pace. Trees use O2 & produce CO2 for many decades before switching to the reverse of that, longer than lumber harvesting companies wait to harvest & replant.

We obviously need to produce less CO2 & establish more dedicated forest zones, but we have stuff like Alaska & Utah being opened up to lumber & mining. Our representatives won’t represent us, because they’re too busy representing coal/ oil/ etc, because of bribery/ coercion.

The heat is already cooking people away, but it’s only just beginning. Eventually, our progeny will need spacesuits just to survive the extreme heat. I might be being overly optimistic, we might need spacesuits.

If the climate keeps heating up, droughts/floods will worse (floods are actually very bad for agriculture) so crops will die. Famine/drought will cause mass migrations on scales that make current migration seem laughable. Soldiers posted at borders will mow them down. Some of them will see/smell the oceans of red they’re creating & be sickened & there will be breeches. This is actually the main reason billionaires are rushing to produce AI & contract with the government. It won’t have any disgust for what it does.

This is a very unpleasant view, but it just seems true, and believing in true things usually yields better results than believing in lies. But this is depressing, so please, use your best historical/ scientific/ logical arguments to help change my view.

So, recently I've been learning more about feminism. One of the core values of feminism is defeating the patriarchy, and the standards that come with it. Im going to go ahead and clarify that patriarchy is defined as "a social system in which power is held by men, through cultural norms and customs that favor men and withhold opportunity from women."

If are always in powerful positions, how can the patriarchy be defeated without appealing to men for our rights? If women want any rights, they have to get them from men, and all of the rights they're being given right now are from men. This is why a "matriarchy" has never existed, queens were always surrounded by men.

It seems like we cannot live in a society where women are capable of being completely independent from men and giving themselves rights because men have the power to enforce those rights since (on average) they can overpower women at any time.

Is it really possible to live in a society that isn't a patriarchy in any way whatsoever?

For a long time, despite being on the political left and a strong opponent of Donald Trump from the beginning, I thought it was a mistake to attack the character of Trump supporters. I tended to argue that dialogue, friendship, and relationship building on a personal level, and supporting an economically progressive agenda while de-emphasizing identity politics on the political level, were the solution. I would usually point to admirable individuals such as Darryl Davis (who has, through friendship and dialogue, convinced more than 200 former klansman to give up their robes and change their views) as proof that most Trump supporters were not bad people, but simply wounded people misguided and misled by a con-man. It wasn't condemnation they needed, but compassion for their situation and a willingness of the part of others to walk in their shoes and understand their pain. In some limited cases, this may still be true.

Now, however, 10 years after Trump came down that escalator and announced his first campaign, I can no longer hold to this generous view in 90% of cases. If you still support Trump at this point, it's time to take accountability for the harm you've caused and are continuing to cause. You can't pretend that January 6th didn't happen. You can't say that you don't see the brazen attempts at voter suppression and intimidation going on, including the mobs unleashed on election officials who dare to defend democracy. You can't pretend you don't know about children being put in cages or people being deported without trial to gulags in El Salvadaor. You can't pretend you don't see the brazen oil-driven imperialism and disregard for human life in Iran and Venezuela and threats of violence or "economic force" to annex friendly countries like Greenland and Canada. You can't pretend you didn't hear him call an entire nationality "garbage" repeatedly or seriously hold to a view that this man is not profoundly racist. You can't seriously believe that he's really a paragon of Christian virtue or even remotely respects women. At this point, I have to conclude that unless you have been living under a rock for a decade (which is highly doubtful given your continued devotion to the Donald) or have an intellectual disability, you are probably just okay with all of this. Maybe some of it even gives you sadistic pleasure.

In any case, continued support of Trump is completely morally indefensible regardless of your political affiliation, and it's time to call it out for what it is: mean-spirited, racist, perhaps even evil. Maybe you're miserable and want to watch the world burn, but this world belongs to all of us, and you can't be allowed to continue to hide behind positive motivations. You are supporting a malignant narcissistic authoritarian madman. If you're spending a lot of time on this, you're probably not a very pleasant person to be around yourself, and you shouldn't be surprised if you are losing friends or becoming estranged from family members.

Please understand, I genuinely want my view to change. This is not simply a rant. It is an honest summary of where my mind currently stands with regard to this. I'm tried of the way Donald Trump is impacting culture and society, and it makes me profoundly sad and angry that such a large number of people seem to actually being enjoying what is happening. But I don't want to throw a third to 40% of Americans out of my heart, and I know that my view is probably not completely fair. Please help me see my errors and regain the compassion that I used to have, in a way that is in line with the truth and appropriate to the gravity of the situation.

To get right to it, there's three states in my proposal. Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, roughly along the lines of the 1967 boundaries.

Israel will pretty much maintain its current territorial boundaries. Gaza will be managed by an international taskforce until its rebuilt, at which point it'll begin holding free elections, with the only change being that Hamas and similar affiliates are banned from participating. The West Bank will be a little more complicated, in this proposal it effectively gets the Bosnia treatment. It remains one state, but with two autonomous political entities inside it: the Federation of the West Bank, and the Federation of Judea and Samaria (like how Bosnia has Bosnia proper and Republika Srpska.)

So maybe it could be more accurately described as a "3.5 state solution," but that's my idea in a nutshell. So how do you change my view? Pretty much by either coming up with a better proposal, or by challenging the logistics of a three state solution.

I say the logistics and not the ideology though because the subject of this thread is more about the functional solutions. I'll hear any argument, but I'm also a classical liberal, a supporter of global democracy, and the Western way of life, I'm not going to respond to any of the "err derr genocide, the West is the source of all evil, glory to Russia and China, etc." Unless of course there's a functional solution to follow that theory and not just pure ideology.

EDIT: This was brought up to me in the comments and it's a very important point. I am defining "ideal solution" as the most likely outcome to be stable long term and to provide all of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza with democratic outcomes.