I get that this is upvoted a lot due to being constructive but it also reflects a lot of Republican media tropes about the left that aren’t really true - and that’s why trying to “fix” these things won’t work - because it misses the real problem.

Examples: No significant figure on the left is saying “men are rapists”, or telling men to be more like women, etc. Reducing suicide, safer workplaces, and reducing excessive prison sentences are all priorities for the left and not for the right.

I think the real problem is quite simple: Republicans have invested heavily in portraying themselves as the “masculine party”, and in driving the narratives I’ve mentioned. And because Republican leaders like the Murdochs and Elon tend to be men, they’re best at driving those narratives.

Which goes to the real underlying problem with the left as a whole - no ability to drive or counter a media narrative. The right has Fox news and Elon’s control over Twitter, which they can and do regularly use to create whatever narrative they want. Notice how for example they just made white south African farmer killings a topic all of a sudden. The left has a bunch of corporate media whose top priority is selling truck ads. Sure, maybe the reporters themselves are left leaning, but they have no top down guidance as to what narratives to build.

And until the left creates some sort of media capability to create and control narratives, the right will always have a leg up. And because of that, none of the well intentioned ideas here will actually work. If the left tries to appeal to men, the right will decide how those appeals will be interpreted.

On the contrary it’s right, perhaps even acute

Assuming you actually believe I misunderstood their argument, perhaps it would be more useful to explain their actual argument that I’m not grasping?

So this version of the argument basically amounts to: people who have harmed society should contribute to social welfare that bolsters the economy and society collectively. Which while a solid effort and earning my upvote, 1) the_petty_auntie’s reply doesn’t show signs of making this particular argument and 2) in this particular case, it fails because society as a whole wasn’t harmed by her son’s actions - rather a particular victim was. And as the victim was a teen at the time of the incident, it’s unlikely that the victim would be able to take advantage of student loan forgiveness unless it happened many years ago.

The question asks why the audience’s student loans should be repaid now when hers were not. The response is that the reason is the same as paying for her son’s prison sentence for raping a minor, which is “betterment of society”. Let’s count the number of ways this fails:

• “For the betterment of society” is a justification that could be used for pretty much any defensible policy decision. It really doesn’t further the argument at all unless there is something specified about how paying student loans makes society better.
• RAPING A MINOR is in caps both to indicate shoutiness and to emphasize this aspect of the crime, which again, is hard to tie back to an argument about student loans
• The main failure - the fact that it’s a blatant ad hominem directed at the poster for having a son who raped a minor, which is an evidently successful attempt to hide the weakness of the purported argument by casting the OP as someone whom one would not want to be associated with by virtue of being a parent to a rapist. This implied argument, which is the real argument, is invalid in the absence of evidence that rapist-parents cannot have valid opinions.
• It’s also a particularly egregious example of an ad hominem because it relies on guilt/worthiness by blood relation, the same concept behind ideas like racism and even worse, inheritance.

Better answers might include:

• Education costs have risen to a degree that the fairness calculation is now different
• Student loan debt is a threat to the whole economy and just as bailing out banks sometimes makes sense, bailing out student loan holders might as well
• Financial inequality is out of control and we should dispense with antiquated notions of “fairness” to the wealthy when circumstances have been more fair to them overall than at any time in the past

But these answers would not get reposted on social media as much because they don’t play into tribalism and social drama.

All three people here are terrible

Differences in matters of taste leads to disgust

The most politically incorrect truth is this: People are not good or bad, individual people do a variety of good and bad things. Mister Rogers told his gay friend to stay in the closet and marry a woman. Hitler banned animal cruelty. We don’t like to talk about these things, but it’s a true principle and a useful one to live by.

I can’t help but read this while replacing “rock” with “large language model”

Heuristics that almost always work. Hmm.

AI Project Manager: Create a button on a webpage that, when clicked, displays an alert saying “Hello World!”
AI Programmer: “What a sensible requirement! Here you go.”
AI Billing Department: “Project completed, that’ll be 10 million dollars.”
Client AI Payments Department: “Sounds right, paid!”

Always has been.

Skibidi Toilet is the modern Ninja Turtles.

In addition to what everyone else says, I’ve done well with rubbing aloe on after. I’m not usually a natural goop guy but my ex bought it for me and I found it actually works pretty well.

Your position would be more sensible and coherent if you were looking to achieve it through a mechanism outside of voting, but to insist on trying to use the tool you recognize as broken to repair itself is an absurdity, it’s completely irrational.

Your position would be much more sensible if RCV had never been achieved through voting. But it has. And notice the states where it does exist - these are the same places where lots of people vote for Democrats. And the places where it’s banned statewide? Those are the places where lots of people vote for Republicans. We need more of the former, and less of the latter.

I know I’d be a lot cooler, especially around here, if I just put on the Che Guevara shirt and say revolution is the only answer. But it just isn’t. Because every example of that sort of thing just leads to more fascism under a different name. Voting works, it’s the best choice, and I have yet to see any evidence other than wanting to be cool to convince me otherwise.

But as for making it a red line for supporting democrats, sure. I mean honestly, credit to you for proposing something that might actually work. I think if there’s a big enough movement to do that, every Democrat would get behind it.

The two party system is bullshit, and the solution is electoral reform like ranked choice voting.

One party, the Democratic party, usually (but not always) approves of such reform efforts.
The other party, the Republican party, universally opposes such efforts with extreme fervor.

So it makes sense to hate the two party system, but that system is one party’s fault in particular.

I’ve played civilization and I’m pretty sure there’s other forms of government besides Communism and Monarchy that have low corruption, albeit lacking the ability to force the citizens into war on the leader’s whim.

It used to be a racial thing, like only white guys would do it. Probably has to do with the hyperactive degree of masculinity signalling in black and hispanic cultures, at least back in the gangsta rap era. Now we’re in the age of white Republican masculinity signalling, so I guess it’s their thing now.

I will say from back in the days of yore when a girl would let me anywhere near her it did strike me as a bit gross, but I did enjoy seeing her enjoy it. I think the fact that it’s a bit gross and she enjoys it means it’s kind of subservient, so you can’t be an alpha male if you do it. Says a lot about how so much of this sort of fundamentalist masculinity culture is pretending about what men want rather than being about what men really want.

That’s a much bigger topic though.

15 Senate Dems vote to cancel billions in Israeli military aid

There’s 49 senate Democrats, which means 30.6% of Senate Democrats have voted for ending aid to Israel. 0% of Republican senators voted to cancel aid to Israel.

Furthermore Republicans absolutely love to abuse pro-Palestine people in the worst ways they can, including arresting and deporting pro-Palestine people and cutting off funding for colleges that allow you to protest. I don’t think that’s “slightly less” evil.

Finally even “slightly less” evil is by definition less evil. Getting in a car crash at 80 MPH is only slightly less likely to kill you than getting in a crash at 90 mph. So what’s the point of hitting the brakes?

To be honest, to someone who’s observed this conflict for a long time, your side is getting its ass kicked. Israel has taken more land for 8 decades and no one is stopping them as they take more. You need every last advantage if you want to turn the tide. Don’t be lazy, make the necessary distinctions between those who might help you and those who will do whatever a judge will allow them to do to harm you.

Republicans are fully committed to supporting Israel and its extermination campaign. Democrats have several members who have called for ending aid to Israel. They are not the same.

https://www.axios.com/2025/04/03/senate-democrats-cancel-military-aid-israel

This was in Canada and we asked people, how much would you pay to clean one lake from acid rain pollution? And we asked other people, how much would you pay to clean up all lakes in Ontario from acid rain pollution? And people gave roughly the same number.

• Daniel Kahneman

Point is, the vast majority of people are black and white thinkers. You’re either cleaning pollution, or you’re not. 100% of the party supports cutting off aid to Israel, or they’re all literally committing genocide. You are merely one of the vast majority.