Schadrach

joined 2 years ago
[–] Schadrach -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You're not wrong. There's nothing that requires the two parties be Dems and GOP. But you're not going to overturn one or the other in a single election, and that means losing to the farthest big party from you, likely a few in a row, while that gets resolved. Especially if you try to do it top down instead of building support from local/county offices up.

Basically, if you could get enough third party support, you could either supplant one of the existing parties or force them to shift to stay competitive. The argument is that trying to do so with the office of president when doing so promotes a fast track to outright fascism is a painfully bad tactic.

[–] Schadrach 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Honestly, we need to reform our economic system and not continually rely on fertility to solve all of our problems.

Fertility and demographic collapse aren't about supporting an economic system. Even if we were a post-scarcity communist utopia women would need to average 2.1 children/woman to maintain the existing population (2.1 isn't growth, it's maintenance - if you wonder why it's slightly higher than the number of people involved with making new people it's because you also have to cover for infertility and mortality among those children) or the same population-level result would occur. The nasty thing about demographic collapse is that it's subtle until it isn't and by that point it's really hard to fix. There is no economic system where people don't need to make more people to have a stable population, at least not unless/until we achieve some kind of immortality.

Ultimately you have three options when it comes to the topic, and they all have downsides:

  1. Get your people to make more people. Downsides: Those new people aren't really contributing to society for a couple of decades, which means it's a long term fix for a problem that might be a big problem in a shorter term than that depending on where we're talking about. Also, there aren't a lot of ethical ways to do this, and the ones that are ethical aren't extremely effective.

  2. Import people from elsewhere. Downside: If you do this too quickly and/or without pushing for assimilation you will irrevocably change if not destroy your culture. This is why places like Japan and South Korea aren't allowing unlimited mass immigration from anywhere people are willing to come from despite being on the cusp of the "until it isn't" part of "subtle until it isn't."

  3. Do nothing, and hope it just fixes itself. Downside: This is essentially a death spiral for your people.

[–] Schadrach 4 points 3 days ago

What exactly does “should” mean in this context?

I think the implication is that it's essentially being prevented from collapse because it's so ingrained in international trade that if it were to collapse it would hurt you and your allies too much, so you don't allow it to collapse when it otherwise might.

[–] Schadrach 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I suspect the person choosing for that day wasn't thinking along those lines though.

[–] Schadrach 1 points 4 days ago

I think white does most of the heavy lifting there, at least in western democracies (for example being white is not a benefit in say Japan). Straight carries a bunch of the rest (and would carry more, but you can't tell someone's sexuality just by looking at them), and then you get down to men.

To put it another way: If I asked to to provide statistical evidence that the criminal justice system is biased against black people, you could name off a bunch of stats that you would argue present compelling evidence. If I took the same data from the same sources and broke it down by sex instead of race, it would present a similar picture of men and you'd argue that same data is suddenly meaningless because it disagrees with your model. I'd argue that the idea that society has a sex hierarchy as such is the wrong model to use entirely.

Instead, when it comes to sex it's all about perceived agency - men are perceived to have more agency than they do and women are perceived to have less. Essentially men are seen as more "responsible" for what happens to them/what they do and women are seen as less "responsible" for what happens to them/what they do. And this cuts both ways. If a man hits a woman, even in self defense it's his "fault" and she's just a victim. If a woman hits a man, even in an unprovoked attack people will start by asking what he did to deserve it. Men get worse bail, higher chance of conviction, loner sentences, etc in criminal justice because they are more "responsible" for their wrongdoing than women. At the other end, men are also treated as more "responsible" for their accomplishments, in general. Which helps men reach the very top positions at a higher rate than women. If a male teacher commits statutory rape of a female student, she's definitely a victim and it won't be called anything but rape but if a female teacher commits statutory rape of a male student the media will often describe it as an "affair" or "romp" or similar and focus on how complicit he was with the activity. Etc, etc.

[–] Schadrach 2 points 4 days ago (3 children)

It’s november 19th

...which is also World Toilet Day, which typically gets more attention. Note that it was International Men's Day first, so someone decided they needed a Toilet Day and decided it should be on the same day.

[–] Schadrach 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Remember a Trump clip that was allegedly disappeared from the internet?

Which clip was this?

[–] Schadrach 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Why excuse the same being done for men? I would have said "a group based on sex", but the people doing this definitely understand the issue when it's women.

[–] Schadrach 2 points 1 week ago

Especially since the most common sexuality just...wasn't on the tier list at all. Not even marked as F tier or something.

[–] Schadrach 15 points 1 week ago (6 children)

That's how men are measured, so equality I guess? Seriously though, note how much talk about men as a class is specifically about CEOs, Senators and the like who are far, far away from the average experience.

[–] Schadrach 2 points 1 week ago

Has been at least since Occupy at the very latest, if not since Gloria Steinem was involved with the CIA.

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