"What we need to do to ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power, that is one of my highest priorities,” she added.

Whitaker followed up, asking, “If Iran is building a nuclear weapon, would you take military action?”

“I’m not going to talk about hypotheticals at this moment,” said the vice president.

The problem is that you see people dismissing criticism and think it’s a disagreement of principle when in fact they hold the same principle and disagree on what does or does not meet the agreed upon criteria.

I haven’t added any extra meaning at all, nor is there any attempt to “derail” the conversation. You’re attacking something that nobody actually believes.

See, like, I see my criticism as factual and respectful, and you disagree. You don’t think it’s factual because you disagree with my analysis. Virtually all disagreements about what criticism is valid are like that.

I’m not adding any additional meaning. As I explained, nobody says, “My group is above criticism” but what they say is, “The criticisms against my group are nonfactual and/or disrespectful.” Everyone agrees with the principle you’ve said, but that principle is completely meaningless because any perspective that wants to shut down criticism will just say that it’s nonfactual or disrespectful.

If you just think critically about it and break down what your statement actually means, it’s just “I agree with criticism I agree with.” I don’t really know what more I can say to explain that, it seems very straightforward to me. From your other comments, you talk about people criticizing major religions, well, suppose someone from a major religion says, “I agree, and also, I think such and such criticism is disrespectful.” Maybe you don’t think it’s disrespectful. Maybe they make a criticism about you that they don’t find disrespectful, but you do. Who determines which criticisms meet the criteria of factual and respectful? Everyone can accept your standard and carry on exactly as they were, simply saying that the criticism they agree with meet the standard and the criticisms they disagree with don’t. It’s pretty meaningless.

Are you often finding yourself in situations where people aren’t disputing facts and norms, but just whether, in principle, legitimate criticism should be said at all? Can you give me an example?

Basically you’re just saying, “I agree with criticism I agree with.” Nobody would say, outright and in principle, that they think a group is above criticism, but people are going to disagree on which criticisms are factual and respectful.

You’re absolutely valid and not overreacting. Unfortunately, depending on where you live, you might not have many other options - but if you can look into other modes of transportation you should.

Driving is dangerous, and not everyone is cut out for it. The great thing about public transit is that it’s much safer and less stressful, it doesn’t demand focus and attention - and that benefits drivers too, because it means fewer bad drivers will feel like they have to drive and it reduces traffic in general.

It all comes down to what the alternative is. If your alternative to driving is relying on others to drive you places, it’ll reduce your independence or be expensive (if you use rideshares). But if the alternative is biking or taking a train, then by all means go for it. There’s lots of reasons cars suck, danger, stress, insurance, gas, traffic, pollution, lots of reasons to look into other options.

Thank you, brainfart on my part.

tl;dr Because that’s communism.

Let’s look at the history of labor movements in the US.

At first, yeah, you started with a pretty broad cross section of society (the Knights of Labor, for example), as well as some more radical elements. Then you had the Haymarket Affair, where people were protesting for an 8-hour work day, and the cops started killing protesters, and someone (possibly a provocateur) threw a bomb at the cops. The press went wild with it and it kicked off a red scare where many labor organizations kicked out and distanced themselves from Anarchists and Marxists.

Fast forward to the Great Depression, and you’ve got a new wave of radicalization because people are seeing the failures of capitalism, and that led to the New Deal. There was another red scare as the US and USSR became rivals, and that served as “the stick,” while the New Deal policies served as “the carrot.” The labor movement once again distanced itself from the more radical elements on the promise of a cooperative government. All the communists, who were more concerned with a broad movement of solidarity, got kicked out of groups like the AFL-CIO, and the unions were considered acceptable because they were (at least to a degree) narrowly self-interested.

These unions flourished in the 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, during this post-New Deal, Great Society era. They weren’t necessarily the most inclusive, but they worked well for their members. However, in the 70’s an economic phenomenon emerged that was termed, “Shrink Stagflation” - a period of high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. The Keynesian economic model (which had had a broad consensus up until that point) said that you deal with unemployment by having the government spend more money, and then when unemployment drops, you reduce spending to avoid inflation. It didn’t have a clear answer for what to do when both were high at once, that wasn’t really supposed to happen.

The Carter administration made the decision to focus on inflation instead of unemployment, which screwed over the labor unions. But this was a broad bipartisan consensus among the Washington elites, and when Carter was replaced by Reagan, he did the same and pushed it further. Under this new paradigm of “supply side economics,” people’s identities as consumers was emphasized over their identity as workers. Even having purged radical elements and having become relatively toothless, unions were vilified and blamed for making goods expensive, and they didn’t really have the power to do much about it.

Question of economics were increasingly moved outside of the realm of public accountability and influence, being left to “experts” and both parties having broad agreement about things, but we still had to vote over something, and so we had the emergence of the culture war. Around the 90’s you had some rather boring presidents and debates, because it was the height of “the end of history,” where there was this idea that all the big questions and conflicts had been resolved and it was just a question of little tweaks here and there.

However, in the 2000’s, as it became clear that conditions were declining and the wealth gap was growing, there has been a new wave of radicalization, on both the right and the left, which started to really manifest in 2016. But it is very much in its infancy, without a lot of experience or strength. It’s been over 40 years since we had strong unions (and even those ones were defanged). Now, we’re fighting against entrenched anti-union and anti-worker policies, practices, and beliefs. And progress is being made, but it’s a long, uphill battle, and a lot of it is young people figuring things out from scratch.

Funny how extreme poverty starts racing down as soon as China adopted capitalist market reforms.

I wonder if there was any opposition to those reforms, like, maybe some kind of big protest right as they were being introduced 🤔

When Kent State happened, surveys showed an overwhelming majority of Americans blamed the students for getting shot more than they blamed the guard for shooting them. There were all sorts of fake news stories going around on TV about how the protests were filled with outside agitators doing things like putting LSD in the water supply. It was only once the opportunity for a reaction was safely past that they said, “Oopsie, we made a mistake.” There have been many other cases where the government and media lied until it determined it was safe enough to tell the truth, including the justifications for several major wars.

“Oh, well this gun costs less than your watch, and yet: hand it over.”

This also happened to me once too. I was working at Amazon as a picker, and they unveiled a new tool that lets you put in electronically if you’re planning to leave. One morning, I put in that I was planning to leave in a month. Before lunch that same day, I was suddenly fired.

When he was a serf, they said to him, “Let me find you in this field: I will hang you if I find you in anyone else’s field.” But now he is a tramp they say to him, “You shall be jailed if I find you in anyone else’s field: but I will not give you a field.” They say, “You shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside your shed: but there is no shed.” If you say that modern magistracies could never say such mad contradictions, I answer with entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps were summoned before a magistrate, charged with sleeping in the open air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced about twopence, to prove that they could have got a bed, but deliberately didn’t. To which the policeman replied that twopence would not have got them a bed: that they could not possibly have got a bed: and therefore (argued that thoughtful officer) they ought to be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much struck with the argument: and proceeded to imprison these two men for not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness, they would have left the court without a stain on their characters; but as they could not avoid it, they were very much to blame.

The desperate man to-day can do nothing. For you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straws sticking out of his hair and says, “Procure threepence from nowhere and I will give you leave to do without it.”

(GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils)

I heard that some people drink so much of that crap that literally more than 50% of their body is made up of water. I don’t even know how it’s possible to still be alive at that point, I mean, JFC it’s like you’re not even a solid at that point, you’re just gonna dissolve into a puddle. Like, get help.

there is a perfectly good flag for England that people refuse to use

Well yeah, but these days, you say you’re English, you’ll get arrested and thrown in jail 😆

We can’t condemn the Nazis because if we condemn the Nazis people will think we’re Nazis. When people see that we won’t condemn the Nazis, that’s how they’ll know we aren’t Nazis.

Non sequitor. Not what I said and not a Republican.

Campaigns are about winning swing states, those are just the rules of the game. Kamala lost that game worse than any Democrat in nearly 40 years. Maybe the rules we have aren’t fair, and if they were different, she would’ve lost by a smaller margin. But then, both campaigns would’ve been run completely differently, the same candidates might not have even been the nominees, etc.

By the actual rules of the actual game, Kamala lost extremely badly.

This was literally the worst electoral map for the Democrats since 1988 when Republicans won Illinois and California.

I’m confused, when you talk about voting “Democrat,” do you mean, for the Democratic-Republicans? I was thinking of voting Federalist, personally.

Since our system makes it impossible to change from the two currently existing parties, it follows that the two parties we have now must be the ones we started with.

But regardless, this is typical shortsighted liberal (i.e. capitalist) analysis that only looks at the immediate outcome and only at electoral politics. If a significant portion of the electorate can make a credible threat to sit out if their demands are not met, then they can leverage that threat to get what they want. The right is much more willing to do this because they put their values above reason, and it works - many Republican candidates understand that if they look soft on things like abortion or guns, a sizable portion of their base will defect, even if it means voting for a crank and throwing the election. Democratic voters are much more committed to being “reasonable” and so refuse to set any red lines anywhere, and the results are clear: the right successfully shifts the Republicans to be more extreme, the Democrats follow, and the left falls in line and accepts it. We are desperately overdue to start learning from their successful tactics and from our own failures, setting down red lines, and thinking beyond the current cycle. And we can debate where exactly red lines should be set, but if genocide doesn’t deserve one, nothing does.

Moreover, the facts of physical reality, the material conditions, and the myriad of crises we’re facing demand radical changes beyond what we are told are possible in the existing system. But those things are physical, natural, immutable facts, while our political system is, on a fundamental level, manmade. We do not have to abide by its rules and what it tells us is and isn’t possible - but we do have to do that regarding the laws of nature, which tell us about things like climate change. Monarchy had no mechanism built into the system to transform into liberal democracy, and yet, here we are. That’s because there are fundamental mechanisms for change that exist within every political system, whether the system wants them to or not, and I don’t just mean revolutions, but demonstrations, strikes, etc. And so, the party I voted for, PSL, participates in electoral politics for the express purpose of building organization beyond electoral politics. Helping a candidate who I see as fundamentally unacceptable win an election is less important that helping to promote that sort of organizing.

My father once yelled at me because he tried to to tell me a story about a friar in the 1600’s whose faith in God granted him the power of flight and I assumed it was a joke. It was not a joke.