Cripple. History Major. Irritable and in constant pain. Vaguely Left-Wing.
I'm looking forward to get my crippled ass Aktion-T4ed in the coming years, so you could say I'm buckled up
You do realize that an educated citizenry is not some superhuman impossible feat for our genetic code, right
Well, the parts ruled by Mexico and Canada, at least.
Funny enough, there's a native aristocrat born shortly after the Spanish conquest of the Inca who wrote a long series of pleas to the Spanish king, essentially saying "You guys are doing REALLY fucked up things here to your own subjects, please stop", but one of the things he unambiguously praised about the Spanish was that they brought European-style bridges with them. Those rope bridges in the Andes are beautiful, and in some isolated places there was no practical replacement for them until the modern era, but they're positively deadly to make, maintain, and repair.
I'm, generally, skeptical of the efficacy of any such ban. But if a ban is going to be in place, 4chan et co seem like they should be pretty high fucking priorities to close off to kids. It's like declaring a ban on beer for health reasons, but clarifying that unregulated backwoods moonshine a step away from wood alcohol is still 100% kosher.
If I tried to explain that to someone who’s not educated enough, they’ll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of “Well, you never know what to believe these days” and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Wow, I never knew I had conservative-related PTSD, but here I am having vivid and terrifying flashbacks to just that scenario.
Yeah, I'm under no illusions that I have it in me to be a responsible gun owner myself. If things get bad enough that near-sighted cripples are going to need more than an aluminum baseball bat for home self-defense, I'm gonna have to rely on my local leftist militia to store my our firearms.
But any chuds who catch a bullet playing "I hope I get to terrorize minorities today" from other people defending their loved ones? No tears shed from me.
I only downvoted your second comment, man. The rest I felt were contributions to the conversation, even if I disagreed with them, so I didn't downvote.
Don't worry. Plenty of blame to go around. The fuckwad voters who enabled fascism by staying home, and the fuckwad party elite who couldn't find their own asses with both hands and a map and lost a lay-up election to fascism through their own venality and incompetence.
Acknowledging that democracy as glorified sortition is not actually in any way better than sortition is not an argument against democracy; it is an argument for creating the circumstances in which an active citizenry meaningfully and knowledgeably participates in the civic life of their polity. It's not about 'weighting' or making suffrage exclusive, it's about creating a society in which good citizenship is enabled and valued by the institutions of society.
Such incidents are typically symptomatic of deeper, systemic problems.
Deep, systemic problems undermine the stability of a polity.
Unstable polities are more likely to make irrational choices in an attempt to stabilize themselves.
Such irrational choices often lead to some high-quality international level game-theory style consequences.
When the systemic problems are rooted in a system that is widely used across a swathe of countries, and is systemically failing in much the same way... well... that's a recipe for some 'interesting times'.
Grant has a reputation as a heavy drinker, which might have influenced it. Mostly his drinking days were pre-Civil War, though.
But also, if your view is that you can’t reason with, or educate a conservative - then why the fuck did you post this JFK quote saying you can?
It's not conservatives who are the target for education here. Like most viruses, conservatism cannot be reliably cured; only vaccinated against. You don't destroy a generation's worth of conservatism by convincing all the conservatives to support the rights of women and minorities; you destroy it by educating the next generation to not make the mistake of their parents and grandparents. And as long as we fail to do that, democracy will remain in peril.
Yeah, no, I spent most of my life in a conservative community, and my first half-decade or so in online politics in right-wing circles. The "Oh, I'm really going to be reasonable uwu" reaction that liberals on the margins of the community receive when they're being nice is nothing but window dressing. When the doors are shut, those same people who act like they just have 'reasonable' concerns and want to be heard will say the most vile, black-hearted shite you can imagine. When they get asspats from liberals, to them, that's nothing but vindication that 'even' liberals recognize, deep down, that their views are right. If you asspat them regularly, they might think of you as 'one of the good ones', but that won't change how they vote or how they think.
It's tiring to see people continually fall for this Lucy-and-the-football trick thinking that if we just found the magic combination of words and tone, we could win over the right-wing.
Liberty consists of the capacity to make meaningful choices; those ignorant of their choices cannot possibly make them. Ignorance itself is a kind of tyranny which chains people.
Fuck family gatherings on holidays. Too ritualistic and anticipated to flake out of. I don't want to be around extended family for an entire day. I barely want to be around myself for an entire day.
