Good point. Hard to know -- there's plenty of people in this forum who are just fine with the way things are, politically that is.

Dunno while I'm replying to a random anon, but anyways.

People can not (mostly) change their sex (AFAB etc).

However, there are a vast proportion of potential gender expressions, and it should be entirely uncontroversial that people can choose from them.

And now, given that I have disagreed with both partisan (US) positions on this, I'll withdraw.

> the belief that men can become women

To be more charitable: people should really read more and try to understand more about the difference between biological sex and gender. Many people think there is no difference and that's why they have such a reaction: "but they are trying to change something fundamental about biology!".

I used to have trouble with it as well, coming from a more traditional society.

As for the other wacky beliefs: they are mostly exaggerated. When talking about police, most leftist I know don't _literally_ want to just dismantle the whole thing and replace it with nothing. The point is to highlight the absolute lousy state of affairs, more than it is to discontinue the notion of policing.

That's not "unfortunate". It was a deliberate choice. Any term used to describe the problem is treated as if it meant something bad, and then we're told we can't talk about it because it's "politicized". As if the entire point of the political process was about something other than resolving disagreements.

Your framing is fundamentally illiberal. Refraining from engaging using “well deep in your heart” excuses means you can self-righteously ignore any position you disagree with and never have to face real argument. And it is wonderfully non-falsifiable, so you can always use it!

I'm sure the video goes into more depth, but the "inevitability of hierarchy" explanation has never made sense to me.

If reactionaries place more importance on hierarchy, then shouldn't this mean accepting the hierarchy as it stands and knowing their place in it? Progressive beliefs are often seen as being a product of out of touch affluenza, so [stereotypical] progressives' relative direction in the hierarchy should be clear. Meanwhile the underclass below them with shittier jobs should make them feel content from being above a different group of people - illegal labor especially puts even more people below them!

Rather what they would seem to want is some other hierarchy where they sit higher. And while it's completely understandable to want to improve your position, it's specious to give this credit as some noble abstract belief in hierarchy rather than mere zero-sum scrapping to improve their lot.

So at least to me, reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of an [unfair] hierarchy doesn't seem like anything particularly different than reactionary propaganda exploiting people's sense of $whatever else to get them riled up and turn off their ability to reason or communicate. It's never actually about the lofty value, but rather emotional appeals to how you've been wronged so let's get revenge.

I don't actually believe that it disproportionately affected the Navajo nation. I believe that it affected the Navajo nation some because a lot of nuclear tests were done in the remote western deserts which is where the Navajo reservation is. And I believe that some people who claimed they were advocating for Navajo interests claimed this constituted an offense against them in such a way that it justifies some kind of disparate action law. But I don't actually believe that Navajo were more affected than non-Navajo by nuclear testing; and I don't want people to be able to claim that they were in such a way that it creates any kind of legal obligation on non-Navajo.

I think we can start with just ignoring skin color and just be people, just be Americans.

>And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all?

I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.

>What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses?

This seems like sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.

What we've seen in the US is the 90s "judge people as individuals" paradigm has been replaced by a "racial collectivism" paradigm. In recent years, this new paradigm was initially mainstream on the left, then became mainstream on the right:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg

The "racial collectivism" paradigm is corrosive to individual rights, no matter who wields it. Furthermore, collectivist activity on the part of one ethnic group ends up being countered by collectivist activity on the part of other ethnic groups, in a doom spiral. The result is descent into hateful sectarianism. Scroll through X on any Tuesday to see what I mean.

>nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”

Consider a hypothetical where the town near the nuclear test has a population which is a perfect microcosm of the US in terms of race, gender, age, class, etc. No "disparate impact" argument can be possibly made in this hypothetical, since all of the racial "collectives" are equally harmed.

Does this change the fact that the nuclear tests are harming people? Or the best approaches to the problem?

Racial collectivism just isn't a good approach. People are more responsive to the needs of others when they view them as fellow humans or fellow citizens, not representatives of alien collectives.

The presence of many token minorities, some of which are elected by popular vote, does undermine the argument that the point is to stop minorities from achieving elected office.

Again, you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.

The point of the Civil Rights Act was that many southern states were trying to stop black people from achieving office because they were black. They weren't trying to infringe the voting rights of white liberals. There is a world of difference between trying to end Medicare and trying to end Medicare... only for minorities.

28 USD for a non-driver ID in my state of residence (1) (exceptions: free if you are homeless or are a blind veteran)

65 USD for a passport card (2) (the cheapest passport option).

Both require attending in-person appointments.

For contrast:

Voting is compulsory in Australia. Citizens may register to vote entirely online, and may prove their identity using a Medicare card or citizenship certificate (or driver's license or passport, ofc) (3). (Aside: this page of FAQs explicitly calls out that these two means of proving ID have been added as a response to increasing feedback from young people, disabled people, and people living in remote areas about having less access to driver's license or passport.)

Obtaining an Australian Medicare card is free, and citizens may prove their identity using a birth certificate (no need for it to be certified) and submitting their application + supporting documents by email (or by mail, but that costs postage) (4).

Free, and no in-person appointment.

1. https://portal.ct.gov/dmv/licenses-permits-ids/get-non-drive...

2. https://travel.state.gov/en/passports/apply/adults.html#acco...

3. https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/enrolment.htm

4. https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/enrolling-medicare-if-y...

Are these REAL ID? Are they free? How long does one has to drive to find an office who can deliver those? How much paperwork is needed? How many times does one has to get back in person to that ID office?

Stop. We can all see you argue in bad faith. You are at best incurious and naive, and at worst...

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Some Americans called left believe the right to firearms is for states not people. Some believe rights can have reasonable restrictions and a weapon and a ballot are different. Some quote Karl Marx who said Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered.

> This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.

And you probably don't live in a dense urban area, or at least a minority-heavy part of one.

I grew up in Michigan. In the suburb where my parents lived, there were 8-10 voting machines for a not-large population and voting was a matter of pulling in, walking inside, casting our ballot, and leaving.

In the college town less than 20 miles away it was a very different story - far fewer machines per person, polling places far away from where students live so they have to find a ride to get there, and more - and this was an intentional tactic to discourage youth voting.

Allocation and staffing of DMV and similar offices where one has to go in order to get an ID are manipulated in the same way.

Yearning for a day when conservatives, whether they identify as one or not, recognize that there’s a rich history of human suffering under the yoke of conservative thought leaders that could be easily avoided if they just opened a history book. Or just read the news. Because there’s no interruption between the two. Jerry Jones is in the background of a photo of the Little Rock 9. Donald Trump led a hate campaign against the Central Park 5 in 1989. These are contemporary issues.

Your own source disagrees with you.

If you actually read the article, you'll see that the argument is that, since the year 2000, it has (as of 2024) broadly become easier to vote. But:

"The South, with its history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, has long lagged behind when it comes to voting access. The CEIR data shows that, although some states have slowly started expanding options for voters, generally it is still the most difficult region for voters to cast a ballot."

And it's only gotten worse since. I strongly suggest you do some cursory research in the future before making comments like this.

(Also from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/05/1235521824/voter-turnout-race... )

Did you read the rest of the article?

* real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins*

The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures

He says that they "almost all" failed -- meaning some are succeeding, and they're always disenfranchising the same people. The average is better, but that doesn't tell you anything about those worst affected.

He's also not talking about gerrymandering, which has gotten worse and worse over time.

Let's hope no one starts an ill informed and hypocritical conspiracy theory about the mail-in voting that has made it so much easier to vote.

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Just decades of statistics and a good number of quotes from numerous politicians that validate the efforts. Like this reported from John Ehrlichman, White House legal counsel under Nixon:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

We're literally in a thread about the FBI trying to get Martin Luther King Jr to commit suicide, and you're waltzing in to claim that there's no evidence? There are piles of it! at least pretend to be arguing in good faith.

The Republicans just don't want to campaign in urban centers. Barely any major city in America has a Republican mayor. It's frankly insane for a mainstream party to just basically give up.

Boohoo. What an ignorant take, a supporter of systemic racism pretending they're a victim of discrimination. Even elementary school children know their history better. You're not fooling anyone but yourself.

That's fair. Thanks for pointing it out. My point should be corrected in this case, but it still stands: that's not how it works.

I answered to the sibling comment. Saying it is one thing. Being consistent with that position is what seems to be missing.

I think that is true when considered in isolation at an intellectual level, but when any issue is discussed in more detail the assumption creeps through. Maybe because it is hard to internalise. Maybe because of the deep division: one thing very odd about the US is that black and white people from the same area (and whose ancestors have lived there for generations) speak different forms of English and/or have different accents.

For example, take the example I gave above. People will not accept self-identify of "race" and have their own ideas of what someone "really is". In America it is often based on the one drop laws of segregation: someone whose ancestry is predominately white can be considered "black".

Also, consider the term I mentioned, coined by liberal Americans. It embeds the racist assumption that the world is divided into white and non-white people: that everyone who is not white one group.

He was advocating for blacks to accept segregation, during Jim Crow. The guy was an idiot and many other black intellectuals disagreed with him.

Pretending he is the sole authority on race relations because he was an uncle tom trying to appease southern whites is hilarious.

>and he says you are W. R. O. N. G.

Your argument is an appeal to authority and "wrong" spelled like initials? What are you, 15?

Yes, Booker T Washington was a bigger expert on race issues concerning African Americans than all of us (nobody doubts that).

Not an expert on global race relations, or the conditions abroad. And obviously those uterrances were an expression of american exceptionalism, and very likely placating white US audiences (as a champion of a contested matter like race relations you never got far if you don't appear patriotic enough. That had to wait until much later with figures like Malcom X, and he didn't have the best of receptions of course).

>but it is wrong to say that the US was the worst. It wasn't.

Nobody said it was the worse.

>Carefully side-stepping...

You wrote a comment, I critiqued it with facts, and it is YOU who is changing the topic and carefully side-stepping that I showed you were wrong. (I replied to someone else about Gaza.)

I have to jump in some cabs now, so you now have time to contemplate the error of your ways rather than hoping I'll see what you write further.

No, that's demonstrably false. You might believe you have common sense, but this is another sign your judgement is, in fact, rather poor.

I don’t think theirs any possible way Social Security or other New Deal programs could be enacted today.

Although it can be argued this should be handled state by state instead. Unemployment pays about 1k per week in Washington , but only 400$ a week in Illinois.

My big fear is a right leaning federal government will eventually dismantle the social safety net entirely. If not that expect rent seeking, ie paying fees to private companies to get your social security checks

For the sake of discussion, can you clarify who you refer to by "puppet masters"?

>It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election,

Jan 6, fake electors scheme, etc. This time it will be a lot worse.

That's not gonna happen.

If one side shuts the other out of power, that's when we'll finally get the civil war many have been predicting for a long time.

Hopefully the framework to limit power can stay in place, in spite of all the calls to change it, abolish the senate, pack the court, make sure to punish/"hold accountable" red voters, etc.

> it's possible to argue that America is still democratic, since it voted for all the stuff that's now happening

It's possible, but not very credible, to argue that in a situation where direct democracy doesn't exist.

The closest we have to voted for these things rather than voted for these people is polls, which overwhelmingly illustrate that most people oppose those things.

We'll know more after the election, if people supported those things.

> It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election

Yes, the current president tried exactly that, in a violent insurrection, and has interfered in national elections since regaining power.

No one voted for what is happening now, because crimes like these were not on the ballot and were not promised in advance. If you vote for a president in a system with three equal branches and then they liquidate the other two - no one voted for THAT.

Was voting for a narcissistic treason weasel predictably going to lead to this? I would say - and did say - yes, without question. He already incited a violent insurrection once, rather than admit he lost an election. But people voted for cheaper groceries and deporting violent criminals.

As difficult as it is to believe, there are many tens of millions of people who think that Trump is a smart business man because he was portrayed that way on The Apprentice. They think the promises of this known huckster and flim-flam man were worth the bandwidth spent delivering them to televisions. They think that FOX News opinion show personalities are qualified to administer the country's government. They didn't vote for fascism, because they don't know what that word means. Many could not even reliably number the branches of government or describe them accurately.

Personally, and this is just my opinion, but many people are aware of the reporting on CA laws and how it's actually impossible to prove voting irregularities because they separate the voter from the vote. And to have people with the attitude she has, it only makes me lean towards - they know the irregularities are real.

It would be interesting to see how that number changes if we excluded governments overthrown by the US.

Just because you get “anti-American slop” doesn’t mean your “pro-American slop” is accurate, nor productive in the context of world affairs.

Americans are among the most propagandized because they are taught theirs is the greatest among all nations from birth, even though it really, really isn’t.

So I think I understand what hypfer's getting at, but I personally would never classify this sort of thing even remotely as "trolling".

@hypfer I'm curious, can you understand / identify with at least some of what I'm sharing below?:

A lot of people (likely near 100% of people) have their own internal beliefs about the world and they are largely commenting primarily to validate that belief (I am literally doing it with this comment). Like you often can see both what the person objectively wrote but then also get a feeling for some internal belief that motivated this specific comment.

And naturally, people are emotionally attached to their internal beliefs. And so sometimes comments are less a sharing of ideas and more a factually coded emotional rationalization of their internal beliefs. And when you read a comment like this that goes against one of your own beliefs, it may feel like an attack.

To me the distinction though is the motivation of the person on the other side. My interpretation is that true trolls have a motivation to incite emotions whereas most other people simply are trying to validate their own beliefs, despite potentially doing it in a way that is not emotionally palatable to all perspectives.

Separately, for you (hypfer), do you agree that there could be some amount of "hostile attribution bias" here? I saw this term while searching about this topic and to me it would explain both your perspective of feeling personally attacked and others perspective of feeling like that's actually not at all what's happening.

It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether someone is a troll "just asking questions" or actually just asking that question. More so on HN than in most of the world, I mean.

Funny, I guess we proved each other right.

I meant nothing personal, but you took it personally. To me, someone saying "hey, maybe you're bringing your baggage to this and interpreting this differently than the speaker meant" is not at all a personal attack.

To you, I guess it is.

So, yeah, HN is full of conversations where people politely suggest you may be wrong. It's never bothered me.

FWIW, it may just be a colossal misconception of my own, but I’d been of the mind that “partner” was in some cases more polite to use because it doesn’t make assumptions about the individuals in question or about the dynamics of the relationship between them. I am not part of the LGBTQ world, however, and am happy to be corrected.

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