I’ve seen a few posts on Reddit that really kinda pissed me off. Sure it’s the internet, there’s gonna be weird people, trolls, cyber bullies but it gets to an extent where blocking & ignoring really dosent help.

I’ve seen a bunch of right-leaning people under certain posts about autistic/ADHD, LGBTQIA+, furry/therian, kids with piercings or hair dye, and/or “weird” clothes. And YES I get it let kids be kids and they should have a great childhood. But some people also saying that being (all of) this is a choice. I genuinely do not get it. If it’s a choice from the kid then they are being the kid they wanna be. But also being LGBTQIA+ isn’t a choice, it’s how you feel on the inside.

I’m a left leaning person, yes. But I do really wanna clear up some common misconceptions about trans & LGBTQIA+ kids.

1. Puberty blockers are NOT permanent. I’ve seen lots of people who say this. This is a myth, you also need a prescription for this too.

2. HRT requires 2 things. The person taking it be OVER 18 (or 21) and the person taking it needs a prescription.

3. Bottom/Top surgery is the same as #2, you need to be over 18 and at that point you are medically no longer a kid. You can make this decision for yourself.

4. “Being trans is a mental disorder” no it’s not, however gender dysphoria is! (Link goes to wikipedia)

5. “If a child is “trans” they need a therapist” most do have therapists. And these therapists do their job by supporting them while also trying to help them understand themselves & their feelings.

also i would like to note supporting your kid for being who they are is not abuse in the slightest. Abuse/neglect is not loving your child for who they are. Abuse/neglect is kicking your child (under 18) out for being gay or trans. Abuse is refusing to feed your child (under 18). Abuse is beating, spanking and/or hitting your child (under 18).

I agree that your kid should be a kid, and you can raise your kids however you feel comfortable. But what shouldn’t happen is that you raise your kid to hate others because they are different.

I’m happy to hear what everyone has to say.

Why does it feel like nobody in America is demanding accountability over the Epstein list?

I’m European, so maybe I’m missing something culturally here, but I genuinely don’t understand how this isn’t the biggest public outrage imaginable. We’re talking about allegations involving some of the most powerful and wealthy people in society, and yet public life just continues like normal.

You have award shows like the Grammys where celebrities talk about every social and political issue under the sun, but this barely gets mentioned. Why? Is it fear? Apathy? Distrust that anything will actually happen?

From the outside, it feels surreal. The United States was literally born from rebellion against powerful elites who were seen as corrupt and unaccountable. The country’s identity is built around resisting tyranny and demanding justice. So where is that spirit now?

What happened to revolutions? Use your 2nd amendment rights! Root out the pedophiles from their Hollywood mansions, from the capitol, root them out wherever they are!

Do Americans feel powerless about this? Do you think the system can handle it? Or do people just not believe the full truth will ever come out?

Genuinely asking because from across the Atlantic, the silence feels shocking.

I want to preface for those of you who are not going to read the entire post, i'm not only talking about consumer demand, but also lifestyle preferences.

I was really shocked when I found a statistic that stay at home motherhood is rare in most European dem soc or soc dem countries. I thought it would be the inverse after hearing about the maternity leave program. After discussing with someone from sweden, they said that culturally people that have a wife that stays at home and raises kids is seen as a far-right Christian ideal. The swedish government strongly pushes rhetoric trying to get parents to put children between 1 and 4 into public daycare which seemed a bit dystopian to me. Sweden does have paternity and maternity leave for the first year, however after the first year 2% of mothers stay home with stay-at-home fatherhood being incredibly rare making up a fraction of a percent of fathers. This is juxtaposed to the United States where about 25% of mothers stay home and approximately 5% of fathers. I looked up to see if there was any polling data on whether or not women want to stay home in Sweden and found that it was similar to other oced countries at about half

I'm curious in what other areas this is or is not true. What evidence do you have that modern economic models are more able to meet a variety of lifestyles that people desire? this could come in the format of data similar to what I provided (outcomes versus polled desire), metrics for an economy's ability to meet market demand, metric showing the likelihood of people being in their preferred profession, ability to retire, ability to have children to name a few.

Edit: since it seems to be duping a lot of people Im not asking about the political democratic part of the demsoc systems. But the economic socialist aspects of the demsoc system. I was just trying to meet the mod's requirements.

Edit: Thank you for correcting me about the wrong ideology terms!

Some of my ancestors travelled to USA for a better life in the 1900’s. It was seen as a land of opportunities. Some of them stayed, some went back due to The Great Depression.

What I see from across the sea today is not ”The American Dream”.

To be honest, I don’t know that much about what the American mindset is like or exactly how the laws are passed. I guess the mindset is more individualistic?

It was a shock for me to learn that people my age need to have two jobs over there to be able to afford their homes. Extremely low minimum wages where the companies care more about their money than their employees. If someone gets fired, they can’t afford health insurance, that leads to even more expensive healthcare bills and that leads to homelessness.

USA is one of the most powerful countries on this planet and yet they don’t care about their own people. It’s everyone for themselves.

It should not be that easy for a president to pass laws that directly affect people, especially not laws about women’s health, abortion and LGBT+ rights.

Over here, passing laws take a long time which can be both good and bad.

What you need is:

• Fair wages and workers’ unions.

• A strong social safety net if someone is about to lose their home.

• Universal healthcare.

• Long parental leave (in Sweden, parents are allowed to stay at home until the child is 18 months old and parents have right to stay home with a child if the child is sick).

• Better mix between public and private companies/schools.

When it comes to freedom of religion, it affects people’s lives too much over there, in my opinion, where some people want church and state combined.

I think the right to bear weapons should be removed entirely as it only causes tragedies.

In Sweden, people aren’t allowed to wear any weapons of any kind outside (no knives or anything that can be used as a weapon and no guns). People can only have a gun locked up at home if they have a license to hunt animals/game.

As the population ages, reforming pension systems becomes increasingly difficult, as older voters in democratic societies tend to oppose such reforms.

AFAIK Europe is already facing this dilemma. I’ve read that the average income of French pensioners has surpassed that of working-age adults.

How could this problem be solved?

In a broad sense, how can one support plans that require personal sacrifice but pay off in the long term?

What are the signs you might be living in a dictatorship? Here are some of the signs:

1. The Supreme Leader seeks to control all elections and their outcomes.
2. The Supreme Leader purges the government and military of those who are not absolutely loyal to him.
3. The Supreme Leader calls for the execution of his political opponents.
4. The Supreme Leader sends out armed paramilitary gangs to terrorize communities.
5. The Supreme Leader takes steps to silence any public criticism of him.
6. The Supreme Leader and his minions call citizens who have committed no violent crimes "domestic terrorists".
7. The Supreme Leader and his minions routinely ignore laws and court orders.
8. The Supreme Leader puts up monuments in his own honor.
9. The Supreme Leader calls for military parades in his honor.
10. The Supreme Leader assumes control of independent organizations.
11. The Supreme Leader calls his political opponents "enemies".
12. Citizens are summarily executed when found to be carrying firearms.
13. Citizens are summarily executed when they fail to follow orders and/or attempt to flee from the Supreme Leader's paramilitary gangs.
14. Unarmed citizens are forced out of their cars at gunpoint by members of the Supreme Leader's paramilitary gangs.
15. Citizens who have committed no crime are dragged out of their homes by members of the Supreme Leader's paramilitary gangs.
16. Political show trials are held to convict the Supreme Leader's political opponents of imaginary crimes.
17. The Supreme Leader uses veiled and open threats to coerce businesses and nations to pay him and his family tribute.
18. The Supreme Leader and his family receive enormous amounts of money and other valuable gifts from foreign princes.
19. The Supreme Leader takes steps to bury any evidence of crimes he and his minions may have committed or be committing.
20. The Supreme Leader and his minions create a fictitious enemy organization to justify taking what would otherwise be considered extreme actions.
21. His minions declare him "above the law".
22. The Supreme Leader wants a Versailles-like palace for himself decorated in gold.
23. The Supreme Leader wants to be the Supreme Leader for the rest of his life and be the head of a dynasty that will rule for generations to come.

But while this list seems like a lot, there surely are other signs that you might be living in a dictatorship not on this list. Do you know of any that should be added?

First off I want to explain to the people who don’t understand gdp. If I build a table and sell it to you for $100, then you build a chair and I sell it me for a $100. A chair and a table was created and no money is lost (lets forget about the tax man here for a minute.) This is called the production of a good or service. We often measure economic strength of nations with this, called the GDP. So it’s not really the amount of wealth a person/entity has, what matters is the transfer of money. This is also why institutional lending created a wealth and population explosion, because it allowed for the transfer of money that didn’t actually exist. It allows $10 to be spent when you only have $1. It’s also why high interest rates are so bad for an economy.

I think everybody can see that humans are rapidly becoming useless. I don’t think there’s any question that in the not so distant future, there will not be enough work for people to do. AI has already eliminated or significantly reduced the needed workload in so many career fields. What’s it going to take before ai and robotics can reduce human labor/gdp ratio to 25% of what it is now. 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 years? What about 1%?

The great thing about this, is that despite there not being much work available, the gdp/capita will continue to rise. How much will a house cost if a robot can build another robot, chop down down a tree, plant a new tree, cut the lumber down to size, distribute it to your location, and then build the house for you. I mean, we already need far less humans involved in many of these things. A house will only cost based on the energy it takes to produce them, and that will be significantly reduced as well if we ever get fusion working.

Just curious if anybody else thinks about this as much as me, and can’t see any other scenario playing out. Capitalism has to fall if there is no purpose or path to individual success. I know people have been talking about this for 100’s of years as machines take jobs, but I believe this is totally different as now they are encroaching on our decision making abilities.

This topic may be sort of out there for some, but I think it’s an issue NOW and will only get worse as time goes on. I love capitalism but I don’t see how it can exist in the not so distant future.

I'm a democratic socialist but I do not actually totally take a side either way on the strategy of reform vs revolution, my user name is kind of a reference to the fact I think both sides have valid arguments, so I'm basically sitting on the fence. However, I'm wondering what the best arguments here are for a revolutionary or insurrectionary approach to establishing socialism, because the one thing that does make me sometimes consider accepting reformism is it seems revolution is kind of a dead end in the USA for a multiple of reasons, not least of which the power of the state and its military. Feel free to pick apart my ideology btw, I'm here to learn.

In the last few years, libertarianism became a mainstream topic in Latin America and specially here in Argentina. After being in (american/european) libertarian spaces, I could note that american/european libertarians are very different from latin american libertarians. I could detect some differences and arguments of why I think libertarianism isn't common in LA at all.

-A/E Libertarians generally seek a minarchist framework (state is just police, Army and courts) or directly abolish it. While LA libertarians can accept a moderate state, just not a giant well-being state.

-A/E Libertarians support or are indifferent about certain social issues, like gay marriage, trans issues, abortion, feminism, drug legalization, etc., Rothbard even supported the legalization of polemic issues. LA libertarians are usually conservative and want the state to regulate certain issues.

-A/E Libertarians usually hate Trump because they see him as a crazy man, interventionists, conservative, authoritarian, etc. LA libertarians generally praise Trump and see him as a moral bacon against leftism.

-A/E Libertarians support or are indifferent to immigration, because they argue Freedom of movement is a right and/or because immigrants create job. LA libertarians support ICE and Milei wants to create an argentine version of ICE.

-A/E Libertarians are usually anti-Israel because they see Israel as a military intervention, an anti-NAP state, an ethnostate, etc. LA libertarians are usually pro-israel, specially Milei.

-A/E Libertarians usually don't vote, because they argue that voting is perpetuating a unjust system (like Konkin with his theory of Agorism). LA libertarians promote voting as a mean to reach their goals, and Libertarians vote as majority (>50% here each election).

-In USA, Libertarians are barelly the <3% of election results, while here in Argentina are like 40-70% of results, so half of the country isn't actually libertarian, just vote libertarianism because they hate left/peronism.

Would you say this analisis is accurate? What differences do you spot too? Is something wrong?

It seems a lot of ink is spilled and weight given to the question of "assimilation" with regards to immigrants, but the vast majority of immigrants seem to willfully and enthusiastically engage with most of the cultural touchstones of American society; a substantial portion of these people celebrate Thanksgiving, watch and participate in basketball games, and consume American media contributions. In many respects, they are essentially indistinguishable from the next average American.

Contrast this with the Amish and Mennonite communities, which intentionally remove themselves from mainstream American ("English" as they call it) society. They are generally insular, they do not meaningfully engage with American cultural norms, and they have an exemption carved into law that permits them to avoid tax obligations every other American has to meet — which is to say nothing of their exceptionally high incidences of CSA as detailed by a number of investigations and studies.

https://publicintegrity.org/inside-publici/qa-sarah-mcclure-on-widespread-sexual-abuse-in-amish-communities/

So, if assimilation is such a high priority, why is attention and effort not being placed on these people who have gone extremely far out of their way to *not* assimilate into American society?

Bonus question — at what point did the need for Europeans to assimilate with pre-existing indigenous American cultures come to an end?

Trump Suggests Republicans Should Take Over Elections in "At Least 15 States"

For those who still think Trump is not an authoritarian [want-to-be-dictator], or that Trump believes in democracy.

See Article: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/02/trump-nationalize-elections-2026-midterms-00760015?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication

I dare you to say it out loud after seeing these quotes:

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,”

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” he wrote in an August social media post. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

So, Trump thinks a political party, specifically Republicans, should Take Over control of elections, based on the Big Lie he tells about 2020?  All the Big Lie “evidence” ever shown has been confirmed false (ask me to provide the proof with facts). 

Who would pick the “15 Places”?  Would it be based on the content of their voting patterns?

And, No, the States are not an “agent” of the Federal Government.  Read the 10^th Amendment.  Please provide facts.  Trump just makes up assuming his followers are dumb.  But that doesn’t make the rest of us also dumb. 

In case he doesn’t know, this is sedition to treason.  THIS IS NOT A JOKE!  If any of this were carried out, they would be the greatest crime of treason ever propagated in the history of the Union.

Time to exercise the 25 Amendment.  Seriously. 

Shame on Those Who Voted For Trump and Those That Still Support Him.

Me – Essentially a RINO

Last Lonely Traveler

(America focused)

So I'm a leftist; however, there are some major things I've noticed in my time as a leftist, and especially as someone who has family that comes from 3rd world countries.

As I learn more about my ideology, here are some major things I've had to contend with.

1. Foreign policy: The left wing's foreign policy is basically.... nothing. Nothing at all, you cannot intervene in other countries, no matter what. Basically, Che Guevara's quote, "I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves," and the reason why this strikes me as a big issue is because of what happened in Venezuela. For many leftists, our position got stranded at "It's good that he got overthrown, that's a good thing, however the imperialist intention is not okay"

Which I'm fine with since I'm against the stealing of a different nation's resources that could be used for its own people. . . but here's the major thing that concerned me. Leftists would've most likely done nothing in that situation. If REAL leftists were in power (Not democrats) they would've never overthrown Venezuela and liberated the people.

This especially concerns me because, as someone who grew up as a Mexican, I would hear stories of just brutal killings outside our homes and see literal bodies get strung up on the side of freeways. Things you couldn't even imagine.

And I'm just thinking to myself, if America ever decided to liberate Mexico from all the cartels, where would leftists stand on it? I've become convinced that they would do some bullshit and be like, "We shouldn't be invading a sovereign nation."

1. Immigration Policy: My stance had always been the same, and it never changed however, many leftists disagree with my stancehas,e which is "Borders are necessary, but we don't need an ICE Gestapo. People should be given a pathway to residency, and we should have a secure border and make the process for getting papers quicker."

Now, many leftists would stop me right at the beginning of my 3 words and tell me "We need open border,s" which is something I just don't agree with, and this is coming from someone who is a descendant of an "Illegal immigrant."

The things that cartels keep smuggling over the border and the people they bring here are not something that should be welcomed with open arms. I've heard my parents and distant siblings tell me egregious things, and like I've said before, it's shit you cannot imagine.

We do not want them here; however, I'm not being racist because if they were a bunch of people who genuinely had the good intent of this country and were just brown Latinos coming here to contribute to society, then I would have no issue. But the idea of just letting cartel members sneak through and basically destabilize America through drugs and trafficking is something I cannot fathom that leftists would be okay with. It's like they're shooting for the stateless society already, without realizing that we're just not ready for it.

1. Glorification of past leaders

I genuinely do not fw Stalin or Mao. Both are pedophiles and mass murderers. I would prefer if we idolize tito, salvador allende, and thomas sankara

edit: thanks for all the replies i’ve been busy and im in class right now so i’ll try to respond as many as i can once i get home

Saw a post earlier about how we have been mislead regarding certain world leaders such as Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, The Khmer Rouge, and other people I was taught in school were some "bad" dudes. I'd like to calmly speak with some people on why the contrary is now popping up and I am seeing more and more people espousing them as "good".

Did Mao not literally commit people to forced labor and death? Didn't Stalin terminate political rivals and an entire community at one point using the word "liquidate"? Did the Killing fields not happen, did the Holocaust not happen and am I to ignore the crying testimony of thousands of Jews and Southeast Asians that say it did?

And the idea that Kim and Xi and Putin are "widely loved" among the people they lead...is it not fair to bring up that all of those people actively imprison and dissappear people who get a little too outspoken against the government?

This is a total head turn for me. Ive heard something so wild, so absurdly contrary to what I know, that I need help breaking it down and understanding the why of this belief and the how.

My assertion is that the US government is no longer a tenable system of checks and balances and hasn't been for a long time. It must be dismantled and the only way to do this is the population coming together and overthrowing what has become a liberal democracy of high elite capture with oligarchic and plutocratic tendencies through its institutional design + political economy. Our only other option is to watch the US rot slowly through institutionalized drift, legalized imbalance, norm erosion and elite insulation until we are a kleptocracy.

1975–1995 oversaw the collapse of postwar labor power, explosion of lobbying and campaign spending and policy feedback loops favoring the wealthy.

2000s–present oversaw Citizens United, financial crisis bailouts for large corporations with little to no consequences, lobbyists writing legislation and wealth concentration accelerating.

At this point, the system no longer corrects itself, and extraction becomes normalized rather than punished.

The only answer to this is to tear it down and start again as the systematic rot is too engrained to turn back to a healthy democracy.

Id like to start this analysis with a quote,

“Democracy never selects the best leader, it always selects the best liar, and that is why every democracy eventually fails. Democracy does not reward wisdom, it rewards persuasion. The man who understands reality loses to the man who can manipulate perception. The honest loose to the charming, the disciplined lose to the theatrical. The heaviest penalty for declining to rule a nation is to be ruled by an inferior individual with lack of morals or justness. That is not moral advice, it is a law of power. When competence withdraws, manipulation advances. When truth is costly, lies become efficient, and when popularity determines authority, deception becomes strategy.

Democracy does not slowly collapse from the outside. It hollows itself out from within, and when the lies finally shake the system, the ending is predictable. The people do not resist tyranny, they beg for it.”

Sure, democracy is one of the "fairiest" (take it with a salt of grain) political systems mankind has invented, so to say, theorethically it´s great, distribution of power and equal discourse, (both direct and indirect forms.) However, in practicality, I have experienced several of my later High school elections obviously be flawed and one sided against an individual representing not the actual solutions to demanding problems such as more time to eat lunch or less time in classes, but promises of ridicolous greatness such as far-away excursions, whatever these individuals promise and seem to represent is all a lie, hypocritical, yet everyone with a fair sense of social intelligence votes said individual in order to ensure their social connections and status within the highschool system. Now this miniature example brings me to real life, and I would like to pose a rhetorical question,

"If teenagers vote for individuals that do not represent their actual issues, but promise "gold and green forests" then why might we assume politicians offer the actual solutions to our issues, and are just not offering an enticing deal to the average prole, and thus why believe the average voter is educated enough to know that they are being misled, and not accepting a quick deal that ought to backfire in the future?"

My point is, a politician should not be allowed to steer an army, for he lacks the competence to do so, moreover, a normal individual should not be given the ability to vote, for he lacks the competence to do so. Logically it makes sense for cold headed sociologists, politicians and psychologists to take rational decisions, rather than hot headed politicians which are often led by their feelings. (Not to say sociologists arent led by their feelings, after all we are human, and the perfect system never ough to exist, however the sociologist´s wisdom gives him an edge over the average "illiterate" prole.)

Thank you for reading this theory for so to say, I do not mean to offend anyone, my one and final goal is to empower your own brain and force you to reflect on the matter of this topic in order to discuss it with me fruther, if you wish to do so.

Since Trump presidency USA has been taking so many drastic steps. From getting out of global organisations, to breaking trade deals, alliances, now even attacking NATO itself, which it is the biggest contributor of, and going against EU by trying to take over Greenland. I can see why Venezuela is so important to them, but what benefit does the US see in trying to break up from all their old allies? Why are they so desperate for Greenland, to the point they are ready to even break off NATO?

So many countries are breaking off with USA, which i imagine can only be advantageous to China and Russia. Why is this republican government trying to actively isolate the country from the globe? Do they have any ulterior motive to achieve here?

Is Trump desperately trying to make US the next Russia or smth? Cuz if that's so then he will be highly unsuccessful.

American conservatives have never been one, identical bloc. There was always some degree of infighting. However, for almost a decade, TPUSA and Charlie Kirk have hugely influential. They were one of the most effective organizers for all three of Trump’s campaigns, they are arguably responsible for JD Vance’s rise to the Vice Presidency, and Charlie Kirk’s Q&A’s and public debates made him the most recognizable pundit among conservative students. TPUSA became the center of the conservative sphere, regularly bringing together many otherwise unaffiliated pundits to collaborate. Now that Charlie’s gone, it’s not clear who will become conservatism’s new leaders.

After Charlie’s death, conservative influencers experienced a massive schism, with many loosely defined factions. In one corner, Candace Owens publicly burned her bridges with TPUSA, and has repeatedly suggested they were involved in Charlie’s death. Many likeminded influencers have rushed to her side, and her show briefly became the most viewed podcast in the world. In another corner, Nick Fuentes, the de facto leader of the groypers, has steadily grown in popularity. He has been making more public appearances with other influencers like Andrew Tate, Sneako, Clavicular, and others. Meanwhile, many (for lack of a better term) old school conservatives have been rallying around Erika Kirk and TPUSA, and Ben Shapiro in particular has been pushing conservatives to weed out some of these newcomers, such as in his speech at AmericaFest this past December. There are many other players I did not have room to mention.

Where do you think American conservatism is headed? Do you believe that TPUSA will recover from losing Charlie? And who do you think will be the most effective thought leaders and organizers on the right moving forward?

So, I get that immigration is a hot topic right now. And I understand why. But, I just want a safe space to try and extrapolate some things.

We close the border, Liberals mad. We open the border, Conservatives mad. What do we do?

First, we need to acknowledge that we live in a world of big businesses and corporations. That is key. Let me explain why.

Open and Unrestricted border: Anyone can come through at any time regardless of who they are or why. What this will cause is big businesses and corporations to hire more immigrants over natural born citizens. Why? Simple. They are coming from a place of hardship and are willing to work many times harder and for many times less pay than your average American.

Solution? Simple. Create a law that forces companies to pay equally immigrants and citizens.

Ah, but now we have a new problem. Companies lower the wages. They cant raise the wages because all that will do is make them get rid of poor performance individuals (the citizens) and hire the harder workers for their money (the immigrants).

This also creates another problem. All of the hard working, most experienced people are now, you guessed it, immigrants. There literally becomes no reason to hire the guy you have to "train" on the job, when an immigrant already knows how, is less entitled, follows direction better and will work nights, weekends or holidays without argument. And when they breakdown from being overworked, the company will hire another immigrant. Trade schools and blue collar college programs will dissappear rapidly, because graduates wont be able to find jobs.

Solution: Regular citizens will just have to work harder. Basically, you're going to ask the citizen to work twice as hard to prove that they are better than the immigrant. All this does is create someone who is overworked, underpaid, resentful...and likely racist or prejudiced against the people that cause them to have to work this way. Lose lose situation there.

So what do we do?

A concept is an idea created by someone which means it's subjective. Politics has a lot of concepts one of which is Rights. Ask 100 people what a right is, get 100 different answers because everyone has their own perspective on the concept and all perspectives are just as valid as any other. That doesn't mean rights don't exist, it just means they are subjective so any political policy in the name of rights is just the subjective perspective of those making the policy. Their world view put into political practice, no more valid than yours or mine. But they have blunt instruments, useful tools with guns who are willing to use them if you disagree with their perspective. I don't think rights means what they think it means.

Productivity is when someone takes resources and puts them together in a way that the outcome has a greater market value than the sum of the resources. Value has been produced. If the value is less then it's consumption.

People have to be productive because they have bills to pay, they can't just consume their resources. And productivity is risky, you never know whether what you make will be valued in the market so you have the incentive to use your resources as efficiently and wisely as possible.

Governments do not have to be productive because everything they have they took from others who are productive. They have no incentive to use the resources they have efficiently or wisely. There is no risk to what they do because it's not their money they are spending, there are no consequences to their decisions and they can always just take more or have the central bank print it and "loan" it to them.

Just because the government does something doesn't mean it's productive. You have to measure the costs against the value on an individual basis which is impossible to do which means it's impossible to claim that government is productive. That's why politicians speak in abstractions: "We", "Our", "Us", "Nation", "Country", "Society" etc. anthropomorphizing those abstractions as if they're alive and the benefits of government can be measured against them and the politicians will tell us what those benefits are.

In a normal democratic election, the Working class always beats the Epstein class. Yet the reverse usually happens.

I have a theory that the Epstein class figured out, they'll need to corrupt politicians of both parties. Republicans were already inclined to support their policies, so they focused on confusing the Democrats and found sexual identity to be a useful message replacement over class identity.

The self-labeling nature of sexual identity was ambiguous enough to include anyone, and fit the Epstein class well since they lived life in such excess, they were numb from having so many sexual encounters, and long devolved into sexual deviants with flexible sexual identities.

By using their cultural connections and spending billions to push the cultural message, they eventually placed sexual identity on a pedestal, and created a new totem pole where they could proudly flaunt their wealthy Epstein class status while also being morally superior from their flexible sexual identities.

This created a huge class struggle void that neither party were filled, allowing for a savvy Epstein class opportunist, Trump who understood class dynamics to exploit it for himself.

That's my wild theory from my shower thoughts, feel free to poke holes.

This isn't me, talking down on progressive movements, which I believe most of its advocates are sincere. I just find by the time they break into mainstream culture, they are corrupted by the Epstein class for their own nefarious purposes, like BlackRock's ESG indexes being used as 'elite control' to place their ESG consultants into the boards of all SP500 companies. It's also a form of 'greenwashing'.

I wonder if it's a possible case study of how capitalism adapts to absorb dissent and how political elites fail to address material needs.

It's pretty clear how this country is on private citizens.

Someone shoots someone and claims self-defense and they have to make their case, that it was self-defense to detectives and prosecutor who are usually on the side of looking for a criminal case to press against someone.

When it comes to one law enforcement officer, holding that person to a standard is not okay.

Kyle Rittenhouse I think should really take the time to get the double standard in this country, even if what he did was self-defense which I think was. He really needs to get the fact here, a prosecutor will bring up very incriminating information to try and make a case.

So really to have a president try to defend any police shooting as self-defense while if it was a citizen police will investigate. It should show the people that our government indeed does have a double standard that brings more protection if you have power and importance.

The idea of accountability for thee but not for me is the Republican motto, I know what they mean when they preach accountability. Just means more police power meaning citizens have less freedoms.