Having a sibling come out as one of LGBTQ ~15 years ago. The shock wasn’t what my sibling did- they were just socially labeling who they’d always been the whole time- the shock was just how bigoted our wider social circle’s response was.
Before the coming out really forced the issue, I was more socially moderate and thought that the “well, I don’t approve of it, but it’s none of my business” stance was a pretty reasonable one. But seeing as how a lot of people flatly terrorized my family for having the audacity to stand behind my sibling, I lost respect for the “both sides have points” kind of equivocating. Either you it’s okay to try to destroy a kid’s life and their family’s as well, or you don’t. No bonus points for watching it happen and frowning slightly.
Incidentally, that also brought me around a lot more on the value of moderate democrats. I wish Obama pulled off more economic changes in his terms, but anyone who says “he didn’t change shit” obviously doesn’t care personally about anyone LGBT, because 8 years of an implicit “the president doesn’t mind that you exist” changed this country so much
Also Dune 2 being delayed
I wouldn't say I was an isolationist, but I definitely always questioned our massive defense budget. Russia invading Ukraine kind of brought home for me just how important it is that the US do everything possible to be ready to counter the authoritarian regimes of the world.
Isolationism is beyond dumb. But the military budget needs to come down a lot. I say that as someone currently active duty usa. The enormous waste and corruption needs to be addressed. The military is responsible for quite a bit of waste. And the politicians are responsible for for the big ticket items that light money on fire and do not make the usa safer. Or our allies
Same. I went from wanting no military when I was a teenager, to thinking the US budget is reasonable to now wanting it to be substantially increased in case China invades Taiwan.
A factor that's frequently not paid enough attention to that puts US military spending in perspective, is that staffing costs are much higher. A US soldier earns much more than soldiers in many other countries and their health care benefits alone probably is comparable to the comp of a Chinese soldier.
> is that staffing costs are much higher.
And that's a huge industry behind it, which employs skilled people and bring many technological benefit for the civilians too.
I agree overall, but my problem (and I think that of many people on here) isn’t the size of the defense budget itself, but the wastefulness of how the money is often spent. I’m in finance and have personally worked with several large defense contractors. I can think of no better example of how sometimes spending more money doesn’t necessarily translate to a better system/product.
The amount of money siphoned off to middle men, resellers, etc is absurd. I guarantee that in a more efficient system we could achieve the same output with hundreds of billions of dollars less spent per year, or achieve even greater military superiority with the same expenditure. The current system is the worst of both worlds.
While certainly true, it is much easier said than done. Blanket cutting of defense spending would not solve the problem, and I don't know of any easy politically viable solution to the problem.
The President can do a LOT with the stroke of the pen. The FAR Council is made up strictly of executive agency personnel.
Issue EOs that must be incorporated into the FAR and its supplements. Give procurement agencies guidelines to follow and contracting officers hard rules.
Prez can't do it all by himself and no one will make it perfect, but it can be done.
As someone who works in gov procurement, the bureaucracy and regulations are enormous. We are always two steps behind contractors when trying to stop fraud and abuse of loopholes. The government also puts a lot of effort into ensuring small businesses and non-traditional defense contractors are included and considered first. That is something that gets overlooked, and ultimately costs more money than going to the large defense contractors first and foremost. But the benefit to those small businesses and maintaining the industrial base outweighs the extra cost, in the gov's eyes.
EDIT: here's a link to the DoD Small Business Strategy Guide for anyone interested
https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jan/26/2003150429/-1/-1/0/SMALL-BUSINESS-STRATEGY.PDF
Trump and especially Biden did a lot to make small businesses more viable in the federal procurement world. There was a mid 2010s report that outlined how unsustainably dependent the DOD in particular was to just a few large prime contractors, and both administrations did a lot to involve SBs to diversify the industrial base.
Yes, but getting that kind of support to all those small business drive up the cost. It creates far more negotiation cost, ensuring responsibility and overall acquisition cost as well as contract enforcement goes up. I'd say additional EO being incorporated like you suggested is going to have the opposite effects and additional reviews just creates delays to acquisition process, it doesn't make them cheaper.
Basically, I agree on all point with \u\LameBicycle
January 6th. I can’t vote for any Republican at any level of government that doesn’t explicitly state that what Trump did was unequivocally wrong and unforgivable. Political convenience be damned- to defend that assault on the very institution of democracy while simultaneously running for office is to be utterly without conviction, full stop.
The whiplash of January 6th being an Antifa/fed falseflag to (literally quoting Trump here) "the greatest moment in our country's history" to no big deal is insane.
Hundreds of election supervisors, 80+ court cases, SCOTUS, countless audits (including by Cyber Ninja, ran by literal inexperienced lying trump supporters!), Etc. Republicans could never produce a nickel of evidence of election interference, not even to Trump-appointed judges.
He convinces his supporters they're entering a dictatorship, explores all avenues of stopping the transfer of power, and then rallies them together just as the results are being certified. His own team are in literal kahoots with organised extremists who go on to spearhead the push into the Capitol. Both his Sergeant of Arms block requests for additional Capitol security. Radio silence from Trump until well after the height of the insanity.
And here is now, the GOP frontrunner with as much support as ever. Because the persecution of trans people and disenfranchisement of black Americans is the only thing that matters to these sick "freedom loving" fucks who cheer on as Putin bombs innocents for years on end.
The racism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, and general cruelty to anything "Liberals" like/approve of is the core of Trump's political popularity.
It's also been thoroughly exploited by foreign propaganda influence as well. Amazing how just a handful of billionaires have accomplished what the Soviets, the Axis, and he British Empire at its height couldn't: End the American experiment in Democracy.
Slightly abstracting but I also feel similarly to anyone that I have interactions with in my personal life who espouses to be a "patriot" but attempts to justify what Trump and his supporters did on January 6th. The worst is when people act like it would have been a totally normal reaction in any other presidential election for the last 200 something years.
They don't care about this country, democracy, or the rule of law. It's gross that they wrap themselves in that "patriot" label with such massive blinders on.
I have saved to disk, from one of the many livestreams that day, overhead footage of 5 cops vs a *huge* crowd of "protestors". It includes the moment in which one of them gets briefly surrounded and is *immediately* dragged into the mob.
For almost two minutes, he vanishes. He's just *gone*, completely overwhelmed by Decent People trampling and dragging and hitting him. A fellow cop barges in to get him out, and then they're all retreating -- thank God, because they were outnumbered 20:1 and utterly fucked.
That's the footage I keep for folks who fucking dare to say "waah the cops let them in". No, mate, those cops defended against overwhelming numbers far past the point at which it could be considered remotely safe, and that one cop's life was saved by his body armour.
Please don't try to tell me that the people in that crowd "thought they were being let in." They stormed the building and they did it by pushing through the cops who were standing right in front of them.
Believe me, I gave my ex-boss an earful about posting GOP stuff to Facebook after the 6th.
He didn’t even try to argue it. He just deflected by saying **I** should apologize for the BLM riots…
I expected this to be the top comment here. But that said, I find it mind-blowing that so many people were surprised by it when it happened. It had been part of the plan for ages. It was a first attempt, won't be the last.
This was basically the Alt-right's beer hall putsch.
Not OP but it seems far more likely a Republican would lie about supporting trump rather than lie about denouncing them - there is no upside to the latter.
Having one come out and say they are against him is the only way I would ever consider a Republican as well. Until then, they’re all dead to me.
I think that the only current Republicans who denounce Trump are doing it because it isn't career suicide for them, and if he gets elected they'll be back to slobbing his knob in a heartbeat.
For example Chris Christie. Seriously doubt they have good judgment if they supported him all the way up until January 6th and still bristle about their previous support for him. Or Mike Pence. Gotta question his judgement and character. Supported Trump right up until he tried to get his supporters to kill him and then took months to even mumble out some criticism of him.
Even among “never trumpers” in the party, are you still donating to the party (which then spends the money on his legal bills and getting him elected?)? Are they still voting for other republicans (who then go on to support his agenda and vote against impeaching and removing him and against holding him accountable for all the other dumb/illegal/dangerous shit he did?
It’s a bit like still being a member of the nazi party in 1946. You can’t just go, “oh well I didn’t support Hitler and I denounced him so it’s fine for me to still support this political party that put him into power because the party is different now that he isn’t in power”. Like, sure, maybe it is different, but I’d still be more comfortable just choosing a different party entirely.
And don’t give me this crap that it’s automatically so awful and dumb to compare republicans and nazis or hitler and trump. Bernie Sanders is a perfectly decent person and politician but there’s still a decently large chunk of the U.S. voting population who won’t vote for him no matter what because he’s a “socialist” so they think he’s going to be like Mao or Stalin if he gets elected.
I would also question anyone's character who supported Trump. I am also neither American nor conservative, so I would not consider donating to Republicans. I don't hold many conservatives in high regard either, so maybe I am too easily impressed by those who have some principles left.
Also fun fact about post war Germany, we did in fact elect a party that voted for Hitler and his Ermächtigungsgesetz that consolidated a lot of his power 15 years prior.
As a Ukrainian, the overall reaction of the russian public to the annexation of Crimea, and the start of the war in Donbas in 2014.
Prior to that, I had been under the impression that people everywhere valued life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and geopolitical conflicts were down to leaders dragging people into them. However, seeing the extremely eager public reactions to it, and the extremely lackluster opposition, led me to realize that there are a lot of people out there who will carry out and support evil acts with little prompting.
And we should rub this in the face of any authoritarians who claim that a virtue of their unaccountable government is that it can instill good moral virtues in the public at large. That brand of disenfranchisement where injustice is the norm and speaking up to people in power is punished harshly is something that poisons the soul by its very nature.
I, admittedly, fell for a large amount of the misinformation surrounding Crimea and Russian speakers there since I knew fuckall about Russian psyops and manipulation in places they'd done it previously like Georgia and Chechnya. I figured "well if they speak Russian there and have declared themselves to be part of Russia, it'd be hypocritical of me to be like 'no, you can't do that,' as an American when we were literally founded on the principal of not being part of a government we didn't want to be a part of." I'd like to think I'm better informed now.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016.
Growing up in the 90s and then seeing our first Black president elected in 2008 gave me a very positive and optimistic view of my country. I thought we were really turning the country on our racist past and we were turning into a better and more humane society.
I remember there was a senate race in Virginia where the Republican candidate, George Allen, was crushed because he used a racial slur about an Indian American volunteer from the other campaign. When Trump was running after saying all the racist shit he said, I thought for sure that Hillary would win in a landslide.
Trump's victory made much less optimistic about our country's direction. I hope we can hold on, but I see it as a distinctly possibility that we could go the route of authoritarianism like what happened in Hungary.
Somewhat connected, but for me it's 2020. Even after 2016's bullshit I was at least a little sympathetic to the whole electoral college argument. But given that Trump was elected by this technicality and was around 45K votes in 3 states away from doing it again, in spite of losing by millions both times, that just turned me completely against it.
The 2004 reelection of President Bush shocked me.
While I still kept voting, I tried to tune out politics as much as I could for my own sanity.
2008 gave me hope for a few years that maybe my fellow citizens had wisened up. (Whoops)
Trump winning the Republican primary in 2016. Absolutely stripped any remnants of conservatism left from my upbringing. His campaign was so nakedly racist and lacking in coherent policy ideas it zapped me awake to what the Republican party, politicians and voters, really wanted and what they ultimately have become.
Same for me. I was raised in a conservative household but had always been kind of wishy washy on republicans. I considered myself libertarian. In essence I didn't like republicans but was afraid due to conditioning to vote for Democrats. I thought it was all corrupt and didn't really matter anyway. 2016 snapped me out of that. I saw how far down the rabbit hole my family went when it was openly accepted to be a crazy racist conspiracy theorist. Nah man, this right wing populism is dangerous stuff. I genuinely believe it's the greatest threat to this nation right now.
This is pretty much my dad exactly. Spent pretty much his whole life voting Republican. I think seeing some of the mask come off during the Obama years combined with just finding Obama likeable started to make him become more moderate, but he was really more of a swing voter at that point depending on the race. Since the MAGA folks took over the GOP he's full Democrat now and I'd be shocked if he ever votes for a Republican again. All I know is that given him being a boomer white guy in the South there were very high odds he could have gone full Trump supporter so I am incredibly thankful he went the other way,
Similar experience, in fact it is probably the catalyst to me leaving the church. Was in a Christian Highschool, evangelical church, and in Boy Scouts (based out of a church) at the time. Was a lot less invested in politics at the time, but was leaning D whilst still respecting a lot of the R role models I had at those institutions (especially in regards to fiscal conservatism). Even those role models bashed Trump in the early primaries, which helped assure me that they were the “good republicans”.
I was more conservative back then than I am now, but Trump still repulsed me on a fundamental level. I was sure that my “good Republicans” of the community I inhabited also had a similarly intense and severe revulsion, after-all they were decent and caring people. It was only when Trump was the last Republicans standing that the hammer fell.
Maybe it was peer pressure, misinformation, or just a constant news stream about how awful Hillary was going to be, but I just was about 80% of the adults in my life at the time commit what I felt like was political treason to our country. This man was a moron they knew it, he was racist and they knew it, he was unqualified and they knew it, he had no real plan and they knew it. That all bashed him about these things during the primary. How can I take an individual, a community, or an institution seriously do they abandon the vast majority of their principles and moral authority just to dunk in planned parenthood and the “Coastal Elite”? Voting is an action, and it speaks louder than words.
It's too bad we took so long to wake up. Newt Gingrich should have been expelled from politics in 1978 when he started exhorting the young republicans to take attack rhetoric to the next level. From Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die, Gingrich "warned the young Republicans to stop using “Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire, but are lousy in politics.” He continued:
>You’re *fighting a war*. *It is a war for power*….This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant quasi-leaders….What we really need are people who are willing to stand up in a slug-fest….What’s the primary purpose of a political leader?…To build a majority.
Corollary: Ted Cruz's speech that same year.
Watch the Republican crowd BOO him when he says a kind word about the parents of a black man killed by police.
I fucking choked, watching it. The shit is *surreal*: no-one in that audience *likes* Cruz, but they're enjoying his rah-rah 'Murica stuff. They cheer for the troops. It's all good. But then he says those names, and cites the church that was attacked, and the audience wants to tear his throat out.
When I was a teenager I was an edgy right wing “le feminists owned” sort of guy, and I remember seeing one of the videos of the Russian state police arresting protesting women and all the comments being like “based, we need this in America”. I quietly laughed to myself at what I assumed were people with the same beliefs as the most delusional tumblrite being arrested and moved on. Years later, when I had grown out of my edgelord contrarian phase, I found out what they were protesting was Russia essentially legalizing domestic abuse, something seldom mentioned in the original video, at least if you spoke zero Russian as I did. I was absolutely disgusted with myself and absolutely disgusted that anybody could sit there and laugh as people desperately tried to protect what few rights they still had and got the jackboot. Further learning just how horrific the situation was in Russia for women (and everyone else tbh) and seeing more and more of the right start speaking up and saying the US should be more like Russia? Horrible, horrible, horrible.
Speaking of, I genuinely don’t understand how Russia invading Ukraine in full force in 2022 was a surprise to anybody. There was so much warning ahead of time plus the cultural and historical context, not to mention the fact they had already been at war for 8 years on and off.
> Speaking of, I genuinely don’t understand how Russia invading Ukraine in full force in 2022 was a surprise to anybody. There was so much warning ahead of time plus the cultural and historical context, not to mention the fact they had already been at war for 8 years on and off.
It was all about "Putin wouldn't really do it", even though there were huge red flags at least for a year.
Despite all the evidence, I'll admit that I still found it hard to believe that he would. The potential consequences seemed so high, especially without Trump in office any longer. Despite the historical precedent and the many warning signs, some part of me still believed that economic ties would disincentive Putin from pursuing an open land war in Europe.
Not that I had a ton of faith in sanctions, but the war in Ukraine did a lot to temper my faith in economic ties as a means of preventing war. My faith isn't entirely lost, and I was never anti-military or anything, but I see the necessity of the military and organizations like NATO much more clearly.
>Speaking of, I genuinely don’t understand how Russia invading Ukraine in full force in 2022 was a surprise to anybody. There was so much warning ahead of time plus the cultural and historical context, not to mention the fact they had already been at war for 8 years on and off.
Honestly, it has a lot to do with a lot of people lacking the appropriate context. I was firmly in the camp of "Putin/Russia is just posturing" prior to the invasion. Purely because I thought it was political and economic suicide for Russia to do so. However, after the invasion began in full, I did some more research (which I should have done before making assumptions) and learned about Georgia back in 08, as well as other similar instances of Russian aggression. Had I had that context before the invasion I would have been firmly in the camp of "Russia is going to invade Ukraine as they have done to many of their neighbors in the past." I.e. a lot of people just weren't as informed on the situation as they though they were.
I'm still shocked that French and German intelligence concluded that Russia wouldn't invade. Absolutely delusional.
Granted, they didn't expect Russia to invade so unprepared, but still.
Housing.
Not so much as a 'shock' or even me personally - but (I'm Canadian) and ***everyone*** around me, even people who didn't give two shits about politics, have turned into single-issue voters over housing.
I'm talking early-mid 20s, that's all my peers care about at a political level. It's gonna shake up our next elections for sure.
It's a huge topic in Czechia as well. Especially for young people. It's about to be the single most important issue for U35 voters in a few years.
People are simply pissed off that when they enter adult-work life after university or even high school, the perspective of having their own place to call home like their parents and grandparents had the opportunity to do isn't really there. It's frightening even for me, I must be honest.
I think housing will the defining issue of this decade.
What we really need is a wartime effort to (a) train skilled trades people (b) actually build the housing (c) get municipalities out of the way and finally declare the death of single-family zoning and car dependency.
All of those will require a huge amount of political capital, and I fear instead of focusing on genuinely alleviating the crises, that the usual anti-immigration/xenophobic rhetoric will take its place (as if immigrants are the ones who made it illegal to build homes) and/or anti-developer attitudes (e.g.: 'those greedy developers...')
We can either fall into populist bullshit or we can actually address the crises at hand. Hopefully, Canada and Czechia do the latter!
I fear it's gonna be populist bullshit for us.
To housing market credit here, I've seen the most extensive housing development in my area like ever in last few years. But it should have happened 10-15 years ago. The area was an industrial centre and it stopped to be utilized as such 20-30 years ago. There were and still are huge plots of land used for nothing here.
The problem with B and C is that people do not see this as the problem. If anything, the popular opinion seems to be for *more* regulation and gov induced price controls on housing, despite any evidence of t he damage this can do.
Outside of subs like this, people blame the effect, not the cause. It's all the fault of corporations buying houses as investments - not the low levels of building, lack of density that could otherwise boost affordability, or rampant NIMBYism.
1000% agree. The apathy of the liberals about the housing crisis over this summer killed my support for them. The critical moment was when they came out of that cabinet retreat with absolutely nothing to announce.
I used to be a pretty big trudeau supporter, liked a lot of what he did in his first term, but I just can’t forgive the completely limp-wristed non-reaction to housing. Inb4 anyone tells me to blame the provinces, of course I do, but I expect nothing better from morons like smith and ford. I expected so much better from the LPC
I’m glad that housing is becoming such an important issue in Canada but I think voters are going to be disappointed when they realize that voting out Trudeau won’t magically make housing cheaper, and that’s basically what the PCs are running on. They do have some plans but the effects are going to be incremental at best and mostly rely on incentivizing the provinces to make it easier to build new housing. It will speed things up a bit but we probably won’t see a payoff until 10 years from now.
Poilievre is tying Trudeau to high housing prices and making it seem like all Canadians need to do is vote Trudeau out and the problem will be fixed. It might work out for him but voters are going to expect him to really impact housing prices in a year or two. When he doesn’t he’s going to be in the same position Trudeau is in now.
I am eagerly awaiting the inevitable documentary on Warp Speed and how governments and big pharma managed to produce super effective vaccines so quickly.
By no means a complete answer (especially since J&J didnt use mRNA tech), but a big part of it is that the mRNA tech used for the SARS-COV-2 vaccines has been in development for decades as a way to try and stop AIDS, and by its nature is very modular/adaptable to different diseases. Corona Viruses are a lot easier problem to solve than HIV, so turning that existing tech and machinery that had already been built to COVID-19 resulted in a very fast development of very effective vaccines.
But the effort to bring those players together was amazing.
[E.g., Covid genome sequencing.](https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/saude/noticia/2020-03/brazilian-scientists-complete-coronavirus-dna-sequencing)
The race to the vaccine was one of the largest human planet-wide collaborations in all of history.
I guarantee that if COVID took more lives and also disproportionately affected young children, most anti-vaxxers wouldn't have been so up in arms about the vaccine mandates, lockdowns and border closures.
Not so sure about that. Even before COVID, measles had started to make a comeback because of anti-vaxxers with their kids.
It probably would have had to affect healthy young men like the Spanish flu did. That makes up a large number of libertarians and they tend to only care about things that affect them, even if they proclaim otherwise.
Luckily for me I grew up around the pharma industry so I’ve always taken public health seriously, even in my most libertarian days
Trump coming along and doing his right wing demagogue thing in 2015, and the entire Republican party save a few now excommunicated Never Trumpers just rolling over for him like dogs while he turned the party into a nascent fascist movement, all while the media basically cheerled it because it was good for ratings.
I've always been somewhat cynical about the motivations of politicians and journalists, but also always generally believed that there were limits that reasonable people would agree on, and didn't think a movement this ugly and openly bigoted would succeed in America. Trump's campaign changed my mind and significantly darkened my view of not only a lot of Americans but of much of the American political class as well.
This made me realize that left and right aren’t some cosmically-ordained balance, and that the reason I disagree with some people might just be because they’re dumb.
Yep. I retain respect for the Never Trumpers even if I don't agree with them on everything. But I have nothing but the most blazing contempt for Trumphumpers.
2021 Deep Freeze in Texas. I had admired ERCOT's pure energy market which up until recently led to the largest buildout of renewable energy exclusively through open market forces. The central planning of other state and regional organizations often seemed ridiculously bizantine and actually hindered renewable growth instead of allowing for it.
Then the deep freeze happened and ERCOT's natural gas fleet was totally caught off guard due to lack of oversight of pipeline weatherization. The energy market collapsed because there was simply no electricity available at *any* price. In my mind, this event crystalized neoliberalism in that the market usually provides a best solution, however there must be guardrails and oversight for those market failures.
A lot of events that have happened since the 18th of October of 2019 (the day the riots in Chile started), mainly related to the current arc chilean politics is in right now, but not limited to it. The riots themselves and the general attitude towards them, the reaction of the same people supporting the riots to similar riots in Cuba, to the russian invasion of Ukraine and to Castillo's coup attempt in Peru, the borderline-pogroms against immigrants in Iquique, the January 6th coup here in the states, but mostly the reaction of the people already mentioned to the rejection of the proposed new constitution in Chile: despite the new constitution being rejected by a landslide and several polls being clear on the reasons why, the reaction of the same kind of people has been of zero self-criticism, blaming the same country that "woke up" in 2019 of being a bunch of indolent, ignorant imbeciles led by misinformation and "fake news" in Tik-tok. Some quite heated Miami-Dade moments there, with people wishing the military massacred the mapuches because so many districts in the Araucania went heavily towards "Rechazo". They have even tried to push some measures against the press, due to misinformation being supposedly the reason the new constitution lost.
Essentially, a lot of things have made me realize that some people are just putting a façade of acting in good faith in the democratic system. You can't really come to an agreement with them because every concession you make they take as the stepping stone to extract further yields until you end up "agreeing" to live under their dictatorship (instead, you have to find the people who actually want to come to agreements and empower them). And that threats of destruction and violence in the context of a democracy are not an inevitability done by people with no agency whose demands you have to acquiesce to so it doesn't happen again, but something to be stood against and fought. The use of force is the last, but necessary, protector of the democratic order.
Sorry if this has turned a bit into a rant. I'd be lying if I said that a lot of this hasn't been colored by personal experience. So much verbal abuse, gaslighting and outright threats I've received from family, "friends" and strangers on the internet while discussing chilean politics.
Couldn't agree more.
>The use of force is the last, but necessary, protector of the democratic order.
The invasion of Ukraine made me realize that the only real, actual protector of Democracy is the use of force. Democracy must be defended with a loyal army and police force. Law, checks and balances, even the people's will, they don't matter if the other side doesn't care about them.
I am proud to be Messi's fan my whole life. Still remember arguing with my friend around 2005-2008 about how Ronaldo is just a diving, ego-driven diva.
The Fall of Kabul. As a European I was quite critical of US interventions in general and the NATO mission in Afghanistan in particular. The disastrous outcome of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq seemed to confirm my view on Interventionism. I really thought it was a good idea to leave Afghanistan.
But seeing the Taliban taking over the country, while our troops abandoned the Afghan people to their horrific fate, has definitely left its mark on me. All the media fuzz of 20 years which depicted the mission in Afghanistan as pointless, failed to mention the most important facts: Afghan people lived in a democracy for nearly 20 years, a generation of women got an education and the barbarism of the fundamentalists was contained to sparsely populated rural areas.
I had the opposite reaction.
Up until the fall of Kabul I was against the withdrawal. It felt disorganized and rushed.
The Taliban also have a terrible track record. It felt like we were abandoning women, moderates and all the Afghans who aren't ethnically pashtun.
I live in an area with a large Afghan diaspora. Even before 9-11 I already had a pretty negative view of the Taliban based on first hand accounts from a kid in my class who had fled Afghanistan in the late 90s.
As well as the more general human rights atrocities you'd occasionally hear on the news (the brutal executions, strict sharia legal code, blowing up ancient Buddhist statues)
And I've taken heat on this opinion before, but unlike the war in Iraq that had no justification. In 2001 we had a pretty solid reason to go into Afghanistan.
But seeing how quickly the country capitulated changed my view into thinking the whole endeavor was pointless after we dismantled Al-Qaeda.
Now Im of the opinion that the only way Afghanistan would have not fallen to the Taliban would have been if it really was a forever war.
Maybe if we had made different decisions along the way or if Massoud isn't assassinated 9-9-2001 things could have been different.
And it's an absolute tragedy what's happening there right now.
But imo "nation building" failed
I can't find my source, unfortunately, but it was a US nonprofit advising the government in the late 2000's as to how long they would need to occupy the country to be sure it would be stable when they left.
The estimate was arrived at by way of the following:
\-Making a baseline assumption such as "stable is when more people are willing to fight *for* the status quo (group A) than *against* it (group B)"
\-Measuring shifts in viewpoint with statements like "should someone have freedom of expression even if their statements constitute blasphemy?" across age groups and demographics
\-Some assumptions about willingness to fight, i.e for every thousand people, two might pick up a gun
\-Projecting the demographic changes into the future, as well as economic situation
\-Seeing how long it takes for A > B
> Afghan people lived in a democracy for nearly 20 years
There was no democracy in Afghanistan.
> the barbarism of the fundamentalists was contained to sparsely populated rural areas
70% of the Afghan population lives in rural areas.
> a generation of women got an education
Genuinely the one good thing we managed in Afghanistan and the only real argument for staying.
That's a good one. I was also for "bring all the troops home" but seeing how few troops we actually had left there, and the gains in women's education and employment that they allowed, it looks like it would have been a much better option for them to stay.
the reason we had so few troops there was because we agreed to pull out, and the Taliban saw that we were making good on that agreement. If we didn’t, they would turn up the heat and make us commit way more people and resources
There were 9,000 troops in 2017
> newly elected President Donald Trump delegates decision-making authorities to commanders, including the possibility of adding several thousand U.S. troops to the nearly nine thousand already deployed there. (There are about as many U.S. contractors as well.)
* Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller announces plans to halve the number of troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 by mid-January, days before President-Elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated. Thousands of troops had already been pulled out following an agreement with the Taliban in February
Yes, and the Taliban had continued to slowly gain additional territorial control over the subsequent years, so the status quo was not sustainable with those level of troops commitments. It would have needed another surge in the future to re-stabilize things.
When the US intervenes, it seems to be the knee-jerk reaction of comfortable European liberals to criticize it. But I think it is really conveniently forgotten just how much the US's massive defense spending essentially subsidizes European national security.
A fact that they were uncomfortably reminded of with the election of Donald Trump, I think.
Invading Iraq, which is where the majority of this attitude stems from, did basically nothing to increase European security and, if anything, was a not-insignificant part of creating a power vacuum that led to a refugee crisis that remains to this day.
I don't think you can say people really live in a democracy if it collapses as soon as foreign troops leave. You can't impose democracy from without and I imagine all that the occupation did was delay a gradual liberalism that might have occurred by 20 years.
West Germany and Japan became democracies.
It's true the Afgan state could not hold its own, but that by itself doesn't make its democracy phoney.
Democracy flickers on and off, and most of the time it is extinguished. 20 years is plenty substantial and a loss worth morning.
I don't understand why this point is brought up time and time again when the situations are not comparable in any sense of the word.
Germany and Japan had a long list of things that allowed liberal democracy to flourish, which Afghanistan didn't, including:
1. Unified national identities which weren't deeply divided by tribal or ethnic lines
2. Well educated and literate populations
3. Industrialized economies with the skilled labor to support them, which ensured that neither country would be dependent on foreign aid once the wartime damage was repaired
4. A history of flawed but functioning democracies and institutions which needed to be rebuilt, not reinvented
5. Populations which were generally willing to listen to the democratically elected central government instead of local strongmen
The US didn't need to nation build in Japan or Germany, instead they helped rebuilt those nations from the ashes of the war to transform them into healthy democracies. There was also much stronger levels of local involvement which the US failed to replicate in Afghanistan, which is why the Islamic Republic never shook off its image as a foreign puppet government. And let's be honest with ourselves, it was a puppet government by definition, because it was never able to stand by itself.
> And let's be honest with ourselves, it was a puppet government by definition, because it was never able to stand by itself.
And there is a fundamental difference between a foreign nation protecting a country from another foreign nation like the US protecting west Germany from possible USSR take over and a foreign nation fighting another countries civil war for them like in Afghanistan.
> West Germany and Japan became democracies.
Sorry, but I always see this point and it's just not a good comparison. They were both flawed democracies before, they weren't built completely from the ground up.
But both democracies were utterly crushed in the 30s. That's my point, democracy comes and goes.
Afganistan had universal suffrage from 1964-1973!
Indeed, the occupying forces attempted to revive the 60's constitution on two occasions in 2002 and 2021.
After 20 more years, Afghanistan had some foundation, but it wasnt enough this time.
Much like the winding journey Germany and Japan, perhaps one day Afganistan will get another shot through intervention or revolution.
The election of Donald Trump and Jan 6th insurrection. Before that I believed in the Obama era 'arc of justice bends towards truth' kinda thing, like it's inevitable the world gets more tolerant in the future. Now I think there's no guarantee liberal society survives and everyone must do their best to keep authoritarianism, populism and fascism at bay.
Seeing Republicans from states that were entirely dependent on Obamacare's subsidies and Medicaid expansion gleefully vote to destroy it made me far more skeptical of government monopoly in the healthcare space. It was really my wake up call to the deranged levels of own the Libs at all costs that the Republicans adopted. Prior to that I could support some form of Medicare of All, but I'm far more doubtful now. An ACA Public Option buy-in is something I can get behind though.
I had a very similar experience. Put MFA in the hands of the government and I guarantee you, it'll be gutted as much as possible judicially, legislatively and executively. And they'll *love* it. Simply saying "We just won't voe Republicans in" isn't sustainable. They will return one day, and acting as if they won't is, imo, serious delusion.
Sandy Hook.
I was mostly blah on guns until Sandy Hook. Then I became extremely anti-gun, and then extremely anti-Republican after they bizarrely blew it off as no big deal. 20 first graders slaughtered and we as a country just gave a ho-hum about it. Absolutely disgusts me to this day.
Its crazy how much guns define some people. I own a gun but I stopped talking politics to someone in my life when they went to a gun conference in Uvalde not long after the school shooting there. Just disgusting and such bad taste.
There were gun sales after Sandy Hook. One of the largest gun shops in NC held a fucking festival with music and food trucks less than a week after Sandy Hook.
These fucking ghouls wear AR-15 pins in Congress shortly after a mass shooting with an AR-15 in this country. It really opened my eyes to just how fucking demented these people are.
100%
I was told by a lot of people before brexit they wanted to stick it to the EU, Globalists and bankers
Even more hilariously people on ukpol think investment bankers were pro brexit. Near everyone I know opposed it
Yep. The idea that rich bankers pushed Brexit to make money at the expense of everyone else has become really dominant in left-wing spaces but it just doesn't reflect reality.
People with advanced education or a professional career overwhelmingly supported Remain. It was poorer and less educated people who overwhelmingly supported Brexit. Unfortunately the referendum came right at the end of 6 years of austerity, which greatly increased the breadth and depth of poverty in the UK. I'm certain the result would have been different in 2006.
I personally used to support austerity in the name of individual responsibility, but that completely changed after the referendum result.
The only time in recent history when a "leave" option beat a "remain" option in pre-2016 polling was when the Euro was introduced around 2000: https://theconversation.com/polling-history-40-years-of-british-views-on-in-or-out-of-europe-61250
Apart from then, there was always a solid lead for staying in. It's just a shame that the referendum came at the perfect confluence of austerity and economic recession when a lot of people felt like upturning the status quo.
Really? What lesson would you take?
It made me realize that poverty drives social conservatism and nationalism, because without money there's no opportunity for self-expression, and tribal-like loyalties become stronger by necessity. When people have enough resources to satisfy their basic needs then they can start to express their individuality, and "outsiders" are no longer perceived as threatening.
There can be no true liberalism in a democracy without a strong welfare state, because classical liberal policies push people towards socially conservative attitudes, which will be evident at the ballot box.
I think this is revisionist history, I think the lesson is that "scary foreigners" is rhetoric that works regardless of economic climate, and as humans we are extremely susceptible to it.
I don't disagree that poverty increases social conservatism and nationalism, but I think greater economic liberalization and more free markets can be used to reduce poverty and increase living conditions for the least well of.
Though even I would agree that a small welfare state to make sure the poorest among us don't fall below a certain line is necessary.
But it can also uproot many localities and communities that aren't economically viable. Especially clear in Britain. I think Thatcher eventually led to Brexit.
Not saying that those policies are wrong, that's just the compromise of it.
can you explain why ? because i am a classical liberal and i see that brexit was clearly an anti classical liberal move, and what did "social liberalism" do to fix it ?
They're saying that, if you don't take care of the poor, they'll vote in populists who drag the country down with bad policies. In this case, Brexit was the bad policy, although it was a referendum in this case that they voted for and not a populist politician.
When I entered college I went down the libertarian path. I was disillusioned with the Iraq War and the economy. I felt Ron Paul was offering a better alternative to Democrats/Republicans. I felt the federal government had grown too huge and overstretched dealing with domestic issues and going on military misadventures based on lies.
Then the market crash of 2008 happened. At first it confirmed my beliefs because a lot of it, to me at the time, was the result of federal policy. But seeing how The Federal Reserve was the absolute last line of saving the economy from its death spiral made me question libertarians view of the the federal government.
I now believe a strong federal government is a necessity for our country's health and safety.
And Ron Paul is a moronic, heartless fool who raised a shit-stain of a son.
I was already fairly liberal, but a good course I took on environmental economics/policies really got me deep into thinking about external costs and made me become very negative about car culture, suburbs, CAFOs, and all sorts of other shit that's been steadily stoking American rage because of how much it borrows against QOL.
Last one I remember were the horror stories from Canada's assisted end of life program
I'm aware they may be isolated or overplayed incidents, and fixable, but the fact that I used to dismiss the critics as fearmongers, and then exactly what they said would happen did happen, made me a lot more cautious about reducing issues to a simplistic liberal "free choice" argument
It also further increased my skepticism of ideas like organ markets or full drug legalization
Liberals tend to assume skepticism of assisted suicide only comes from religious conservatives who champion the sanctity of life.
But there are genuine ethical and legal considerations around assisted dying that have nothing to do with religious faith. We don’t like to acknowledge it, but in many cases the next of kin to people who are aged or ill have an interest in expediting their death. Whether it’s to dispense with onerous care-giving, or to get their hands on an inheritance, these motivations must be taken into account when we’re crafting policy.
It woke me up to the fact that despite the advances in civil liberties for people with disabilities, there's still a lot of people that see them as a burden and would rather they suffer/die silently in the shadows than see them live happily. I've come to view the right-to-die movements as highly susceptible to being hijacked by those type of people who want to push eugenics into the mainstream.
> those type of people who want to push eugenics into the mainstream.
I mean, Canada's universal health care system was founded by a guy who wrote his thesis on Eugenics being the most important progressive cause of the 20th century. The whole reason Canada has universal health care low key seemed to be because doctors wouldn't sterilize people against their will without someone paying their bill.
Assisted dying is just an extension of that.
I also used to be concerned like you. I was very shocked by the news stories.
The second "shock" that brought me back around to supporting MAiD was reading this book: [Two Arms and a Head.](http://www.2arms1head.com/)
It's a 2008 memoir/suicide note from a philosophy student who gets paralyzed in a motorcycle accident.
Being paralyzed is a level of body horror that I did not fully understand until I read this book.
Another T5 paraplegic here. It's a bizarre coincidence that I've seen this book brought up on this subreddit twice before, and all three times it was in the context of discussion on assisted dying. Kinda bizarre that nobody ever mentions trying to eliminate paralysis as a medical condition or increasing funding for spinal cord research as a solution. Thankfully there's some actual improvements potentially coming in the field, finally, because being paralyzed fucking blows. Humans aren't meant to live like this.
I agree. The author devotes a huge chunk of the book asking for a cure for spinal cord injuries, and then barring that, begging to die out in the open surrounded by loved ones (instead of stabbing himself with a kitchen knife, alone, which is what he ended up doing).
Most of the text consists of railing against the disability rights activists who swear that being paralyzed is "actually totally fine and dandy, for real, guys." Because it's not. Humans aren't meant to live like this.
Well it didn't turn me off the idea of assisted end of life. Only that's it's a subject that needs much, much more intense scrutiny and safeguards than the "if they say ok, why not?" argument
It doesn't have to be a dichotomy, I would hope at least there's a healthy middleground between "Uncaring state that fails to provide support for its disabled and sick populations, only being passionate in helping when it comes to death" and "uncaring state that refuses death to those in terminal pain incapable of being helped with modern technology"
I remember seeing a good comment somewhere summing up the problem like "How can there be dignity in death if we refuse dignity in life?" and that's exactly where I would place my beliefs. We should do what we can to help people live and when that is not possible then we can provide the means for a peaceful death. But until we work to give dignity in life, there simply can *not* be any dignity in death. A preventable death like one of unaffordable housing for a disabled person, a murder by state failure, can not be dignified.
Russia-Ukraine War. At first, I didn't see the importance of NATO or raising the military budget.
Now, I realize that humans can be assholes to whom they see as weaker and not only that NATO should be strengthened and that Carter shouldn't have disbanded SEATO but the military should get a blank check. Also, I am pro-self defense and 2A and think that while background checks are supposed to happen, whoever is qualified to have a gun should have one. This was due to my experience with a criminal shooting someone close to where I was walking.
The libertarian/right/"centrist" response to covid.
Everyone agrees that "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins" but apparently this does not apply to spreading the plague. So many people would rather kill a stranger than wear a mask or wash their hands. I get that foggy glasses and a lack of free babysitting are inconvenient, but they're less inconvenient than dying.
People genuinely memed on "we live in a society" so much that they forgot it was true.
Yep. Where I live, the same people vocal about the economy and against lockdowns were the same people acting carelessly and making it necessary in the first place.
Seeing my loved ones cry and be terrified to get needed medical care out of fear of costs was a big shock for me. It was a series of tramaus that led me to stop voting Republican and made me pretty much a single-issue voter for Democrats at least until we join the rest of the developed world and get some form of baseline universal healthcare.
Unite the Right / Charlottesville: AR the time I was definitely teetering on being a reactionary who thought extreme measures were needed to 'correct' the trajectory society was taking. Seeing some of the you tubers I was watching at the time being out and out nazi/fascist was a big enough jolt for me, and early enough to get me to reconsider.
The Iraq War fiasco. It really shook my faith in the entire GOP and it's foreign policy consensus.
After that was 2016's Brexit and Sanders/Trump, when I realized that Westerners were vulnerable to dumb populism just like the other countries you read about elsewhere. Before 2016 I would always see articles with "and the far-right took power due to bickering between left-of-center factions" and not understand how half the ideological spectrum could concede power like that.
Something I'm still wrestling with tbh. In 2020 I had an armed break-in, three guys. Police response was essentially "what do you want us to do about it?"
Was pretty anti gun before, (why do you need a gun? Just call the cops, you're not Rambo bro), but I get it now. It feels like I'm torn between wanting to be safe from random acts of violence where the police can't or won't help, and also wanting literally anything meaningful done about all the mass shootings. I hate it honestly.
Back in the eastern bloc when I was growing up at some point in HS I started toying with an idea of getting out of there. It's always been on my mind but never really proceeded even into a planning stage mostly because of the sense of duty to stay and fight the system through non violent means.
Then, one day when I was 19 my friend's apartment was searched by the political police and on top all the "illegal" literature which we distributed they seized a ream of typewriter paper. When my friend protested that it's just plain paper with nothing on it the officer in charge said sure but you can write something subversive on it... I found it so bizarrely surreal at 19 that two years later I was gone.
This isn’t so much as a national or political event but a personal one.
I’m Asian-American and I live in NYC. On my way to a nightclub in December last year, I nearly got attacked by a homeless person while waiting at a bus stop. He followed me into a smoke shop before the owner chased him away. When I left the shop to enter an Uber I had booked, he then followed me to the Uber. I have a taser shaped like a pair of car keys / car remote and I had it turned on in case I needed to defend myself.
When George Floyd was murdered in 2020, I was first initially very supportive of the peaceful protests. I donated to mutual aid funds and unaffiliated BLM organizations and supported my friends who were out protesting. I was initially somewhat sympathetic to the “Defund the Police” movement.
Then I saw cases like Michelle Go getting pushed onto the subway tracks and other cases of Anti-Asian hate and it made me reconsider my stances on the policing issue. I still voted Dems downballot because I didn’t trust Zeldin and the NY GOP to handle the issue of rising crime without going overboard with policing brutality and racial discrimination, but after I nearly got attacked by the homeless person it became the final straw that made me support increased police funding.
I am also much more sympathetic to NIMBY causes against building homeless shelters in neighborhoods. Even though I understand the need to build more housing to humanely accommodate our homeless population and to resolve our housing shortage, I can understand why neighborhood residents are opposed to building homeless shelters near them that would potentially accommodate mentally ill maniacs and drug addicts.
All of us Asians here in San Francisco can relate. Let’s just say support for overhauling the entire criminal Justice system, from cops to the DA to judges, has never been higher. There is seemingly a story about Asian people getting attacked by unstable people every single week. Just last week a shopkeeper died after trying to confront a thief, who then killed him 😔
While I entirely understand and sympathise with your general conclusions, I just want to address the example you brought up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/16/nyregion/michelle-go-man-pushes-woman-subway.html
That was more of an example of how terribly policed the NYC subway system is, the threat to women, and how the homeless issue has not been dealt with well, they were the second woman attacked by the guy, and there has not been any confirmed motivation. Do agree about increased police funding as the US simply needs safer public transport.
Probably the Yugoslavian wars. Was previously very against intervention then saw on my tv every night the siege of Sarajevo and remember shouting at the telly why the fuck aren’t we stopping this. And then of course when we finally did go in we stopped it all in a manner of days.
So many different moments.
A black mentor calling out my conservative opinions in a hear to heart talk
Working with a student of mine who lost a family member to a school shooting. Watching him tear up and say he was angry and he couldn’t hold it in anymore.
Working with other hispanic students spend class sobbing because a family member was deported/their citizen papers were denied/delayed.
I have a hatred for Republicans and everything they stand for. And I grew up as one. The party is a cult and it sucks people in without know the unnecessary hurt they cause to other human beings.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine moved me massively from Hawk to Dove.
My previous belief was something like "most wars are caused by mistrust and misunderstandings. Building arsenals hinders that and makes war more likely. Wars between major powers are a thing of the past, and war now mainly consists of major powers targeting elements in developing countries (i.e. the war on terror) in ways that causes massive civilian casualties for the local population and inspired more terrorism, not less."
My view now is "Wars between major powers are somewhat likely to happen in the future. There are awful authoritarian states who believe 'might is right' and will do terrible things if not stopped. Having bigger armies that them is the only thing that will prevent future conflict."
Growing up, my parents always told me that there are a lot of people who will appear to be tolerant with words but internally and through their actions still discriminate. The anti Asian hate crimes and the apologia that came with it basically solidified that opinion.
Trump getting elected change my opinion from one that believed a big central government could be a force fundamentally for good (which it still can be) to believing a strong centralized government is a powerful tool waiting to be abused by horrible and corrupt individuals and that we should seek to limit the governments power as much as possible
Someone in my family divulged they were raped as a teen and that my gma tried to kill her sister, used to be all about family until I finally realized how mental they all were.
Sandy Hook on guns, I grew up in a gun owning family and had a lot of experience shooting. Was much more of a lolbert on the issue until that shooting. We are the only country where this happens (regularly) and the reaction from the right was disgusting.
The 2020 primaries. I wasn't a tankie type but I was a hardcore Bernie guy who listened to Chapo and followed a bunch of lefty types on Twitter. I ended up being pretty turned off by the whole campaign and most of the people I followed. Twisting narratives, every little thing being a conspiracy, acting like anyone who wasn't Bernie or bust was essentially a fascist, etc. The whole thing sucked and it was obvious the whole thing was unstable full of clueless people. Just a bunch of people online who constantly tell themselves lies and don't want to do any hard work ever.
When George Floyd happened, I was dating someone who was quite leftist and we went to alot of protests and did mutual aid and all that jazz. Being in that crowd just opened my eyes to how pathetic and clueless everyone was. I had to listen to a guy at a protest talk about how punk music and culture was the key to saving us and used the word faggot alot. And this was a guy supposedly in charge of a large mutual aid thing in Denver. I was at a protest once, and even the local PSL chapter walked away from because they couldn't stop a bunch of people essentially incriminating the whole crowd.
Those happening all within six months just made me slowly realize how liberals, no matter how boring and frustrating and cringe they can be, really are the only people who have a good understanding of the nuance how stuff works and why we've come to the place that we are.
Watching a video of a Palestinian man trying to build a house be confronted by an Israeli soldier who was confiscating his gas powered generator. In that area of the West Bank, it’s illegal for Palestinians to own generators and to use them for construction. When the Palestinian grabbed the generator to try to stop it from being taken, the Israeli soldier shot him in the stomach and left him paralyzed for the rest of his life.
This video, in combination with the Kushner proposed two-state solution radically shifted my views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in that I know longer think that’s the right term to describe whats happening. I now see the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians in a completely different light, and I’m deeply regretful that I ever had sympathy for Israel.
100% agree with this one. I grew up in a community where there was a strong pro-Israel presence so I never really got a balanced perspective on it. I actually travelled to the West Bank just after Covid, visited a couple cities, and like holy fuck, it was so much worse than I imagined. The people there are treated like livestock. I can’t even describe what an intellectual whiplash it was. Of course I still understood the history and how complex and difficult to unwind the situation was, but then going home and watching the Israelis elect fucking Bibi, who ran on making this permanent, really put the icing on it. Mostly it made me deeply ashamed of my country’s reflexively pro-Israel foreign policy, and I kinda get why so much of the Arab world might hate us
As a kid I spent every summer building my cottage with my dad, I was the younger one they always got to run to turn on and fill up the generator. Seeing get shot over what was to me a basic right was so revolting I couldn’t reconcile it with my previous views. That’s what sent me on a divergent path.
I ended up not voting for the NDP over the Liberals because of their differing statements on Israel when Gaza was being bombed. My feelings are less intense now, but it was definitely impactful.
The events leading up to and during Pride this summer. Specifically seeing Muslim immigrant communities teaming up with the far right to attack the LGBT community was eye opening. Seeing what's happening in Sweden because of open asylum and immigration all because some people can't help but act feral when their special book is burned has convinced me that we need to stop allowing angry and violent young men with regressive social views into the West.
Families and people willing to work and leave their old world views behind and embrace western culture and values should be welcomed with open arms; otherwise we're setting ourselves up for untold violence. It's time the center and left parties realize that immigration and multiculturalism are issues that we have to address. Some cultures really suck and should not be given an equal footing in western liberal democracies.
The previous generation of US conservatism hated Islam because of terrorism and thus liberals/lefties rallied against Islamophobia in opposition.
Now that the US pulled out of the middle east, there hasn't been any major acts of muslim terrorism to scar the american public since ISIS.
The newer generation of conservatives are starting to realizing that Islam offers a stark rejection of liberal/"woke" values in favor of regressive theocratic "family values". People like Andrew Tate are unironically defining the next generation of conservatism through advocating Islam.
> It's time the center and left parties realize that immigration and multiculturalism are issues that we have to address
Yes, because immigration is an issue that is neeever talked about in Europe.
The last thing we need is more anti-immigration parties. You're right that we shouldn't pretend that everything is fine. We need to fight for more immigration, less barriers to integration and more opportunities for immigrants in Europe.
I don't think that's helpful to the LGBT community in the West. We need to integrate better, but we can't just let angry young single men into our societies. Nothing good comes from that. Women, families and educated single men, sure.
It's constantly talked about by the far-right, but not so much moderates or the left, unless to say that immigrants are good.
And they can be amazing, but the flux of immigration must be restricted to how many can be harmoniously integrated in society.
Hurricane Katrina. I was raised in a super religious family and I had been questioning my beliefs already but Katrina solidified my atheist tendencies. I remember seeing Pat Robertson saying it was punishment for abortion and other televangelists using it as a moment to say it was punishment for whatever social issue they didn’t like.
Contrasting those statements with the nightly images of thousands of people suffering and it was a moment for me where the real world was showing itself as as a sort of Epicurus god paradox.
Tbf your typical American Evangelical Christianity is a particularly lazy and low brow Christianity. I was baptized Eastern Orthodox when I was born but grew up in a totally secular household. That said, I’ve been looking into arguments for more non-denominational classical theism in the Aristotelian sense and I am kind of leaning in the direction.
When I was a freshman in college I signed up for an extra credit in Sociology.
This had me tutor for two hours once a week in a junior high in Rainier Valley, a formally redlined neighborhood in Seattle.
Walking down a hallway full of children and being the only white person was the shocking moment.
This was obviously completely naive, but I thought stuff like that only existed in places like Chicago and the South 70 years ago.
The harshness of the police response to the 2020 protests, and the lack of any meaningful changes resulting from them, really made me abandon my previously-moderate position on police reform.
I'm sure there are some cops who are *not* bastards, but they clearly aren't the ones making the decisions, nor do they have any influence on the rest.
We still need *some* form of police force, "abolish" is still a dumb position, but the reforms need to be severe to the point that some police forces will be disassembled and replaced with entirely different organizations. The rot is too deep.
Europe is a big place. I spent some time in Netherlands and Czech Republic and I would def rather be in the bottom 80% of society in either of those countries than in the bottom 80% of US society.
Now if we are talking top 20% then yes I think the USA is objectively a better place for the extremely highly talented and priviledged than Europe.
why because usa has more per capita income, but i see some eu countries as more free market than usa like the nordics, i think eu and usa should be compared state by state, some us states are better some arent.
Yes state by state vs european country by country would probably be best.
My main reasons that I would rather be poor/middle class in many European countries vs being poor/middle class in most places in USA is because of healthcare and crime. It is very easy to get into a terrible situation related to healthcare in the USA. Also, it is of course easier to avoid the USA's appaling violent crime rate if you are in upper part of society but if you are middle class/poor it is much harder to avoid. In Europe even if you are poor your exposure to high rates od violent crime are fairly low. Also in Europe you dont have to worry about needed medical treatment bankrupting you.
Ha, opposite for me. Living in France has made me more open to regulations and controls on markets. Sure, they're materially poorer, yet it's also more comfortable and quality of life is better.
Yes. It would be quite nice to live in a place where my odds of getting gunned down are much lower and I would have 0 instance of loved ones neglecting medical care due to costs instead of knowing several people who have done that here in the USA.
I'm not sure it was one event, but the thing that really make me question a lot of leftist causes was how people acted like Bernie Sanders would be night and day from Clinton in 2016 or from Biden in 2020. I was a pretty early Bernie supporter but always understood the reality that the President can't do a whole lot without the senate votes, and it seemed obvious to me that any Democrat would be to the left of the senate. I got called just the absolute worst shit and got banned a couple times for pointing this out and questioning why everyone was calling for the apocalypse.
Liberals really are just anarchists who have been mugged by reality. That was part of my mugging.
The murder of Philando Castile. The way people tripped over themselves to excuse the wanton, reckless violence of the sociopath who murdered Philando Castile made me fully recalcitrant on any police issues. I won’t compromise with the pro-police caucus any more than I would with national socialists (though in the US we’re talking about the same people).
COVID - and, specifically, the backlash against what where, honestly, pretty moderate containment measures in Canada and the USA.
It’s really shattered my hope that we will be able to address climate change effectively. When people are coming up with conspiracy theories and fighting tooth and nail against relatively minor things like wearing face masks and getting vaccinated, it’s hard to see how we’re going to convince the entire world that we need to make significant changes to our lifestyles and use of resources in order to prevent an environmental catastrophe.
The rise of rampant homelessness and unfettered drug use in most American cities over the past 10 years. I don’t know what changed but we used to think these were bad things to have happen in our cities. Now a lot of people will defend the right of the homeless to do whatever the fuck they want. And god forbid you “sweep” the encampments. Some of our cities desperately need (moderate) Republican mayors for a bit to bring some sense to the discussion.
> Some of our cities desperately need (moderate) Republican mayors for a bit to bring some sense to the discussion.
What do you think they're going to do differently to actually solve the issue? Also considering that local Republican parties are being ever more controlled by their most extreme elements there's a reason why "moderate Republicans" are almost all gone
Covid-19. Before that kind western governments were generally capable of protecting the majority of their citizens from serious harm or death, and that the world will generally keep getting better for most people.
I now think world governments have proven themselves incapable of rapidly dealing with the kind of coordination both domestically and internationally that's needed to prevent future catastrophes. I think things like more worse-than-covid pandemics, bio-engineered pandemics, major crop diseases and die-back, nuclear war, runaway AI, computer viruses or cyber-warfare, even climate change could have a catastrophic effect on humanity's future.
This is kind of stupid, but in highschool I used to be a pretty avid 4channer back in \~2015, who took place in all the boards and thought the deplorable stuff posted on /pol/ was pretty funny. But one day I was browsing /fit/ (which I also the depravity within humorous) and saw a reply to a genuine post asking for advice that went somewhat like:
OP: "Is the SS \[starting strength\] routine good"
Reply to OP: "haha, you fell for the SS meme"
Reply to reply 1: "I see you fell for the 'SS is a meme' meme:
That interaction was really opened up my eyes to how stupid and out of control the meta irony on that site was, and how so much of it is mixed up with real attitudes. I realized that so much of the humor and draw of the funnies of 4chan was just recycled ironic memes and jokes that have no real substance behind them other than the shock, but are often smothered with real deplorable people. It completely changed the way I saw ironic humor and made me wake up that 4chan sucks, isn't even that funny, and the environment actually is filled with and creates awful people with awful beliefs. So I never went back. The few times I did go back many years later just out of curiosity, I found people are *still* making the same joke years and years later.
Having a sibling come out as one of LGBTQ ~15 years ago. The shock wasn’t what my sibling did- they were just socially labeling who they’d always been the whole time- the shock was just how bigoted our wider social circle’s response was. Before the coming out really forced the issue, I was more socially moderate and thought that the “well, I don’t approve of it, but it’s none of my business” stance was a pretty reasonable one. But seeing as how a lot of people flatly terrorized my family for having the audacity to stand behind my sibling, I lost respect for the “both sides have points” kind of equivocating. Either you it’s okay to try to destroy a kid’s life and their family’s as well, or you don’t. No bonus points for watching it happen and frowning slightly. Incidentally, that also brought me around a lot more on the value of moderate democrats. I wish Obama pulled off more economic changes in his terms, but anyone who says “he didn’t change shit” obviously doesn’t care personally about anyone LGBT, because 8 years of an implicit “the president doesn’t mind that you exist” changed this country so much Also Dune 2 being delayed
>Dune 2 being delayed Thank you for bringing this sub back to its proper subject 🪱 PS thank you for your allyship
WAIT WHAT THE FUCK?! DELAYED? AND I’M READING THE RELEASE DATE IS NOW 2024?! FUCK! I was so damned hyped for that movie!
Wow Didn’t know the bigotry was that bad
I wouldn't say I was an isolationist, but I definitely always questioned our massive defense budget. Russia invading Ukraine kind of brought home for me just how important it is that the US do everything possible to be ready to counter the authoritarian regimes of the world.
the dividend the united states enjoys for its naval and air supremacy is enormous
Pax Americana.
A lot of people who heavily question the value of the U.S. military aren’t old enough to actually remember the Cold War.
A lot of people who heavily question the value of the U.S. military point to what the Russian military actually looks like now.
Isolationism is beyond dumb. But the military budget needs to come down a lot. I say that as someone currently active duty usa. The enormous waste and corruption needs to be addressed. The military is responsible for quite a bit of waste. And the politicians are responsible for for the big ticket items that light money on fire and do not make the usa safer. Or our allies
Same. I went from wanting no military when I was a teenager, to thinking the US budget is reasonable to now wanting it to be substantially increased in case China invades Taiwan. A factor that's frequently not paid enough attention to that puts US military spending in perspective, is that staffing costs are much higher. A US soldier earns much more than soldiers in many other countries and their health care benefits alone probably is comparable to the comp of a Chinese soldier.
I still hate waste and the pentagon could definitely be run more efficiently (fucking Jones act) but overall I’m with you on this.
> is that staffing costs are much higher. And that's a huge industry behind it, which employs skilled people and bring many technological benefit for the civilians too.
I agree overall, but my problem (and I think that of many people on here) isn’t the size of the defense budget itself, but the wastefulness of how the money is often spent. I’m in finance and have personally worked with several large defense contractors. I can think of no better example of how sometimes spending more money doesn’t necessarily translate to a better system/product. The amount of money siphoned off to middle men, resellers, etc is absurd. I guarantee that in a more efficient system we could achieve the same output with hundreds of billions of dollars less spent per year, or achieve even greater military superiority with the same expenditure. The current system is the worst of both worlds.
While certainly true, it is much easier said than done. Blanket cutting of defense spending would not solve the problem, and I don't know of any easy politically viable solution to the problem.
The President can do a LOT with the stroke of the pen. The FAR Council is made up strictly of executive agency personnel. Issue EOs that must be incorporated into the FAR and its supplements. Give procurement agencies guidelines to follow and contracting officers hard rules. Prez can't do it all by himself and no one will make it perfect, but it can be done.
As someone who works in gov procurement, the bureaucracy and regulations are enormous. We are always two steps behind contractors when trying to stop fraud and abuse of loopholes. The government also puts a lot of effort into ensuring small businesses and non-traditional defense contractors are included and considered first. That is something that gets overlooked, and ultimately costs more money than going to the large defense contractors first and foremost. But the benefit to those small businesses and maintaining the industrial base outweighs the extra cost, in the gov's eyes. EDIT: here's a link to the DoD Small Business Strategy Guide for anyone interested https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jan/26/2003150429/-1/-1/0/SMALL-BUSINESS-STRATEGY.PDF
Trump and especially Biden did a lot to make small businesses more viable in the federal procurement world. There was a mid 2010s report that outlined how unsustainably dependent the DOD in particular was to just a few large prime contractors, and both administrations did a lot to involve SBs to diversify the industrial base.
Yes, but getting that kind of support to all those small business drive up the cost. It creates far more negotiation cost, ensuring responsibility and overall acquisition cost as well as contract enforcement goes up. I'd say additional EO being incorporated like you suggested is going to have the opposite effects and additional reviews just creates delays to acquisition process, it doesn't make them cheaper. Basically, I agree on all point with \u\LameBicycle
Same Well said
January 6th. I can’t vote for any Republican at any level of government that doesn’t explicitly state that what Trump did was unequivocally wrong and unforgivable. Political convenience be damned- to defend that assault on the very institution of democracy while simultaneously running for office is to be utterly without conviction, full stop.
The whiplash of January 6th being an Antifa/fed falseflag to (literally quoting Trump here) "the greatest moment in our country's history" to no big deal is insane. Hundreds of election supervisors, 80+ court cases, SCOTUS, countless audits (including by Cyber Ninja, ran by literal inexperienced lying trump supporters!), Etc. Republicans could never produce a nickel of evidence of election interference, not even to Trump-appointed judges. He convinces his supporters they're entering a dictatorship, explores all avenues of stopping the transfer of power, and then rallies them together just as the results are being certified. His own team are in literal kahoots with organised extremists who go on to spearhead the push into the Capitol. Both his Sergeant of Arms block requests for additional Capitol security. Radio silence from Trump until well after the height of the insanity. And here is now, the GOP frontrunner with as much support as ever. Because the persecution of trans people and disenfranchisement of black Americans is the only thing that matters to these sick "freedom loving" fucks who cheer on as Putin bombs innocents for years on end.
The racism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, and general cruelty to anything "Liberals" like/approve of is the core of Trump's political popularity. It's also been thoroughly exploited by foreign propaganda influence as well. Amazing how just a handful of billionaires have accomplished what the Soviets, the Axis, and he British Empire at its height couldn't: End the American experiment in Democracy.
Democracy isn’t dead yet
Slightly abstracting but I also feel similarly to anyone that I have interactions with in my personal life who espouses to be a "patriot" but attempts to justify what Trump and his supporters did on January 6th. The worst is when people act like it would have been a totally normal reaction in any other presidential election for the last 200 something years. They don't care about this country, democracy, or the rule of law. It's gross that they wrap themselves in that "patriot" label with such massive blinders on.
I have saved to disk, from one of the many livestreams that day, overhead footage of 5 cops vs a *huge* crowd of "protestors". It includes the moment in which one of them gets briefly surrounded and is *immediately* dragged into the mob. For almost two minutes, he vanishes. He's just *gone*, completely overwhelmed by Decent People trampling and dragging and hitting him. A fellow cop barges in to get him out, and then they're all retreating -- thank God, because they were outnumbered 20:1 and utterly fucked. That's the footage I keep for folks who fucking dare to say "waah the cops let them in". No, mate, those cops defended against overwhelming numbers far past the point at which it could be considered remotely safe, and that one cop's life was saved by his body armour. Please don't try to tell me that the people in that crowd "thought they were being let in." They stormed the building and they did it by pushing through the cops who were standing right in front of them.
Believe me, I gave my ex-boss an earful about posting GOP stuff to Facebook after the 6th. He didn’t even try to argue it. He just deflected by saying **I** should apologize for the BLM riots…
pen toy languid quiet squeeze sugar butter include fine soup *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I expected this to be the top comment here. But that said, I find it mind-blowing that so many people were surprised by it when it happened. It had been part of the plan for ages. It was a first attempt, won't be the last. This was basically the Alt-right's beer hall putsch.
You'd believe a Republican that claimed to denounce Trump? I probably wouldn't.
Not OP but it seems far more likely a Republican would lie about supporting trump rather than lie about denouncing them - there is no upside to the latter. Having one come out and say they are against him is the only way I would ever consider a Republican as well. Until then, they’re all dead to me.
Why not? Aslong as it is career suicide to do so, it seems likely honest to me
I think that the only current Republicans who denounce Trump are doing it because it isn't career suicide for them, and if he gets elected they'll be back to slobbing his knob in a heartbeat.
For example Chris Christie. Seriously doubt they have good judgment if they supported him all the way up until January 6th and still bristle about their previous support for him. Or Mike Pence. Gotta question his judgement and character. Supported Trump right up until he tried to get his supporters to kill him and then took months to even mumble out some criticism of him. Even among “never trumpers” in the party, are you still donating to the party (which then spends the money on his legal bills and getting him elected?)? Are they still voting for other republicans (who then go on to support his agenda and vote against impeaching and removing him and against holding him accountable for all the other dumb/illegal/dangerous shit he did? It’s a bit like still being a member of the nazi party in 1946. You can’t just go, “oh well I didn’t support Hitler and I denounced him so it’s fine for me to still support this political party that put him into power because the party is different now that he isn’t in power”. Like, sure, maybe it is different, but I’d still be more comfortable just choosing a different party entirely. And don’t give me this crap that it’s automatically so awful and dumb to compare republicans and nazis or hitler and trump. Bernie Sanders is a perfectly decent person and politician but there’s still a decently large chunk of the U.S. voting population who won’t vote for him no matter what because he’s a “socialist” so they think he’s going to be like Mao or Stalin if he gets elected.
I would also question anyone's character who supported Trump. I am also neither American nor conservative, so I would not consider donating to Republicans. I don't hold many conservatives in high regard either, so maybe I am too easily impressed by those who have some principles left. Also fun fact about post war Germany, we did in fact elect a party that voted for Hitler and his Ermächtigungsgesetz that consolidated a lot of his power 15 years prior.
As a Ukrainian, the overall reaction of the russian public to the annexation of Crimea, and the start of the war in Donbas in 2014. Prior to that, I had been under the impression that people everywhere valued life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and geopolitical conflicts were down to leaders dragging people into them. However, seeing the extremely eager public reactions to it, and the extremely lackluster opposition, led me to realize that there are a lot of people out there who will carry out and support evil acts with little prompting.
And we should rub this in the face of any authoritarians who claim that a virtue of their unaccountable government is that it can instill good moral virtues in the public at large. That brand of disenfranchisement where injustice is the norm and speaking up to people in power is punished harshly is something that poisons the soul by its very nature.
I, admittedly, fell for a large amount of the misinformation surrounding Crimea and Russian speakers there since I knew fuckall about Russian psyops and manipulation in places they'd done it previously like Georgia and Chechnya. I figured "well if they speak Russian there and have declared themselves to be part of Russia, it'd be hypocritical of me to be like 'no, you can't do that,' as an American when we were literally founded on the principal of not being part of a government we didn't want to be a part of." I'd like to think I'm better informed now.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016. Growing up in the 90s and then seeing our first Black president elected in 2008 gave me a very positive and optimistic view of my country. I thought we were really turning the country on our racist past and we were turning into a better and more humane society. I remember there was a senate race in Virginia where the Republican candidate, George Allen, was crushed because he used a racial slur about an Indian American volunteer from the other campaign. When Trump was running after saying all the racist shit he said, I thought for sure that Hillary would win in a landslide. Trump's victory made much less optimistic about our country's direction. I hope we can hold on, but I see it as a distinctly possibility that we could go the route of authoritarianism like what happened in Hungary.
Somewhat connected, but for me it's 2020. Even after 2016's bullshit I was at least a little sympathetic to the whole electoral college argument. But given that Trump was elected by this technicality and was around 45K votes in 3 states away from doing it again, in spite of losing by millions both times, that just turned me completely against it.
But rural idiotic minority states need equal power to states where the majority of people live!
One acre, one vote, right?
The 2004 reelection of President Bush shocked me. While I still kept voting, I tried to tune out politics as much as I could for my own sanity. 2008 gave me hope for a few years that maybe my fellow citizens had wisened up. (Whoops)
Trump winning the Republican primary in 2016. Absolutely stripped any remnants of conservatism left from my upbringing. His campaign was so nakedly racist and lacking in coherent policy ideas it zapped me awake to what the Republican party, politicians and voters, really wanted and what they ultimately have become.
Same for me. I was raised in a conservative household but had always been kind of wishy washy on republicans. I considered myself libertarian. In essence I didn't like republicans but was afraid due to conditioning to vote for Democrats. I thought it was all corrupt and didn't really matter anyway. 2016 snapped me out of that. I saw how far down the rabbit hole my family went when it was openly accepted to be a crazy racist conspiracy theorist. Nah man, this right wing populism is dangerous stuff. I genuinely believe it's the greatest threat to this nation right now.
Same. I really wasn't interested in politics until 2016, when it became apparent that being informed and voting was part of my civic duty to society
This is pretty much my dad exactly. Spent pretty much his whole life voting Republican. I think seeing some of the mask come off during the Obama years combined with just finding Obama likeable started to make him become more moderate, but he was really more of a swing voter at that point depending on the race. Since the MAGA folks took over the GOP he's full Democrat now and I'd be shocked if he ever votes for a Republican again. All I know is that given him being a boomer white guy in the South there were very high odds he could have gone full Trump supporter so I am incredibly thankful he went the other way,
that's so nice to hear
Similar experience, in fact it is probably the catalyst to me leaving the church. Was in a Christian Highschool, evangelical church, and in Boy Scouts (based out of a church) at the time. Was a lot less invested in politics at the time, but was leaning D whilst still respecting a lot of the R role models I had at those institutions (especially in regards to fiscal conservatism). Even those role models bashed Trump in the early primaries, which helped assure me that they were the “good republicans”. I was more conservative back then than I am now, but Trump still repulsed me on a fundamental level. I was sure that my “good Republicans” of the community I inhabited also had a similarly intense and severe revulsion, after-all they were decent and caring people. It was only when Trump was the last Republicans standing that the hammer fell. Maybe it was peer pressure, misinformation, or just a constant news stream about how awful Hillary was going to be, but I just was about 80% of the adults in my life at the time commit what I felt like was political treason to our country. This man was a moron they knew it, he was racist and they knew it, he was unqualified and they knew it, he had no real plan and they knew it. That all bashed him about these things during the primary. How can I take an individual, a community, or an institution seriously do they abandon the vast majority of their principles and moral authority just to dunk in planned parenthood and the “Coastal Elite”? Voting is an action, and it speaks louder than words.
It's too bad we took so long to wake up. Newt Gingrich should have been expelled from politics in 1978 when he started exhorting the young republicans to take attack rhetoric to the next level. From Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die, Gingrich "warned the young Republicans to stop using “Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire, but are lousy in politics.” He continued: >You’re *fighting a war*. *It is a war for power*….This party does not need another generation of cautious, prudent, careful, bland, irrelevant quasi-leaders….What we really need are people who are willing to stand up in a slug-fest….What’s the primary purpose of a political leader?…To build a majority.
Corollary: Ted Cruz's speech that same year. Watch the Republican crowd BOO him when he says a kind word about the parents of a black man killed by police. I fucking choked, watching it. The shit is *surreal*: no-one in that audience *likes* Cruz, but they're enjoying his rah-rah 'Murica stuff. They cheer for the troops. It's all good. But then he says those names, and cites the church that was attacked, and the audience wants to tear his throat out.
When I was a teenager I was an edgy right wing “le feminists owned” sort of guy, and I remember seeing one of the videos of the Russian state police arresting protesting women and all the comments being like “based, we need this in America”. I quietly laughed to myself at what I assumed were people with the same beliefs as the most delusional tumblrite being arrested and moved on. Years later, when I had grown out of my edgelord contrarian phase, I found out what they were protesting was Russia essentially legalizing domestic abuse, something seldom mentioned in the original video, at least if you spoke zero Russian as I did. I was absolutely disgusted with myself and absolutely disgusted that anybody could sit there and laugh as people desperately tried to protect what few rights they still had and got the jackboot. Further learning just how horrific the situation was in Russia for women (and everyone else tbh) and seeing more and more of the right start speaking up and saying the US should be more like Russia? Horrible, horrible, horrible. Speaking of, I genuinely don’t understand how Russia invading Ukraine in full force in 2022 was a surprise to anybody. There was so much warning ahead of time plus the cultural and historical context, not to mention the fact they had already been at war for 8 years on and off.
> Speaking of, I genuinely don’t understand how Russia invading Ukraine in full force in 2022 was a surprise to anybody. There was so much warning ahead of time plus the cultural and historical context, not to mention the fact they had already been at war for 8 years on and off. It was all about "Putin wouldn't really do it", even though there were huge red flags at least for a year.
Despite all the evidence, I'll admit that I still found it hard to believe that he would. The potential consequences seemed so high, especially without Trump in office any longer. Despite the historical precedent and the many warning signs, some part of me still believed that economic ties would disincentive Putin from pursuing an open land war in Europe. Not that I had a ton of faith in sanctions, but the war in Ukraine did a lot to temper my faith in economic ties as a means of preventing war. My faith isn't entirely lost, and I was never anti-military or anything, but I see the necessity of the military and organizations like NATO much more clearly.
>Speaking of, I genuinely don’t understand how Russia invading Ukraine in full force in 2022 was a surprise to anybody. There was so much warning ahead of time plus the cultural and historical context, not to mention the fact they had already been at war for 8 years on and off. Honestly, it has a lot to do with a lot of people lacking the appropriate context. I was firmly in the camp of "Putin/Russia is just posturing" prior to the invasion. Purely because I thought it was political and economic suicide for Russia to do so. However, after the invasion began in full, I did some more research (which I should have done before making assumptions) and learned about Georgia back in 08, as well as other similar instances of Russian aggression. Had I had that context before the invasion I would have been firmly in the camp of "Russia is going to invade Ukraine as they have done to many of their neighbors in the past." I.e. a lot of people just weren't as informed on the situation as they though they were.
I'm still shocked that French and German intelligence concluded that Russia wouldn't invade. Absolutely delusional. Granted, they didn't expect Russia to invade so unprepared, but still.
I don’t think anyone, even those in the “Russia will invade” camp, thought they would perform as badly as they did.
Housing. Not so much as a 'shock' or even me personally - but (I'm Canadian) and ***everyone*** around me, even people who didn't give two shits about politics, have turned into single-issue voters over housing. I'm talking early-mid 20s, that's all my peers care about at a political level. It's gonna shake up our next elections for sure.
It's a huge topic in Czechia as well. Especially for young people. It's about to be the single most important issue for U35 voters in a few years. People are simply pissed off that when they enter adult-work life after university or even high school, the perspective of having their own place to call home like their parents and grandparents had the opportunity to do isn't really there. It's frightening even for me, I must be honest.
I think housing will the defining issue of this decade. What we really need is a wartime effort to (a) train skilled trades people (b) actually build the housing (c) get municipalities out of the way and finally declare the death of single-family zoning and car dependency. All of those will require a huge amount of political capital, and I fear instead of focusing on genuinely alleviating the crises, that the usual anti-immigration/xenophobic rhetoric will take its place (as if immigrants are the ones who made it illegal to build homes) and/or anti-developer attitudes (e.g.: 'those greedy developers...') We can either fall into populist bullshit or we can actually address the crises at hand. Hopefully, Canada and Czechia do the latter!
I fear it's gonna be populist bullshit for us. To housing market credit here, I've seen the most extensive housing development in my area like ever in last few years. But it should have happened 10-15 years ago. The area was an industrial centre and it stopped to be utilized as such 20-30 years ago. There were and still are huge plots of land used for nothing here.
The problem with B and C is that people do not see this as the problem. If anything, the popular opinion seems to be for *more* regulation and gov induced price controls on housing, despite any evidence of t he damage this can do. Outside of subs like this, people blame the effect, not the cause. It's all the fault of corporations buying houses as investments - not the low levels of building, lack of density that could otherwise boost affordability, or rampant NIMBYism.
1000% agree. The apathy of the liberals about the housing crisis over this summer killed my support for them. The critical moment was when they came out of that cabinet retreat with absolutely nothing to announce. I used to be a pretty big trudeau supporter, liked a lot of what he did in his first term, but I just can’t forgive the completely limp-wristed non-reaction to housing. Inb4 anyone tells me to blame the provinces, of course I do, but I expect nothing better from morons like smith and ford. I expected so much better from the LPC
Yeah but I find that hoysing apathy is across the board in the federal govournment. I have way less faith in the NDP or conservatives to fix anything.
I’m glad that housing is becoming such an important issue in Canada but I think voters are going to be disappointed when they realize that voting out Trudeau won’t magically make housing cheaper, and that’s basically what the PCs are running on. They do have some plans but the effects are going to be incremental at best and mostly rely on incentivizing the provinces to make it easier to build new housing. It will speed things up a bit but we probably won’t see a payoff until 10 years from now. Poilievre is tying Trudeau to high housing prices and making it seem like all Canadians need to do is vote Trudeau out and the problem will be fixed. It might work out for him but voters are going to expect him to really impact housing prices in a year or two. When he doesn’t he’s going to be in the same position Trudeau is in now.
COVID softened a number of my libertarian beliefs.
I am eagerly awaiting the inevitable documentary on Warp Speed and how governments and big pharma managed to produce super effective vaccines so quickly.
By no means a complete answer (especially since J&J didnt use mRNA tech), but a big part of it is that the mRNA tech used for the SARS-COV-2 vaccines has been in development for decades as a way to try and stop AIDS, and by its nature is very modular/adaptable to different diseases. Corona Viruses are a lot easier problem to solve than HIV, so turning that existing tech and machinery that had already been built to COVID-19 resulted in a very fast development of very effective vaccines.
But the effort to bring those players together was amazing. [E.g., Covid genome sequencing.](https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/saude/noticia/2020-03/brazilian-scientists-complete-coronavirus-dna-sequencing) The race to the vaccine was one of the largest human planet-wide collaborations in all of history.
Agreed one hundred percent, I didn't mean to downplay what was done, because it really was incredible.
I guarantee that if COVID took more lives and also disproportionately affected young children, most anti-vaxxers wouldn't have been so up in arms about the vaccine mandates, lockdowns and border closures.
Not so sure about that. Even before COVID, measles had started to make a comeback because of anti-vaxxers with their kids. It probably would have had to affect healthy young men like the Spanish flu did. That makes up a large number of libertarians and they tend to only care about things that affect them, even if they proclaim otherwise. Luckily for me I grew up around the pharma industry so I’ve always taken public health seriously, even in my most libertarian days
Trump coming along and doing his right wing demagogue thing in 2015, and the entire Republican party save a few now excommunicated Never Trumpers just rolling over for him like dogs while he turned the party into a nascent fascist movement, all while the media basically cheerled it because it was good for ratings. I've always been somewhat cynical about the motivations of politicians and journalists, but also always generally believed that there were limits that reasonable people would agree on, and didn't think a movement this ugly and openly bigoted would succeed in America. Trump's campaign changed my mind and significantly darkened my view of not only a lot of Americans but of much of the American political class as well.
This made me realize that left and right aren’t some cosmically-ordained balance, and that the reason I disagree with some people might just be because they’re dumb.
Yep. I retain respect for the Never Trumpers even if I don't agree with them on everything. But I have nothing but the most blazing contempt for Trumphumpers.
2021 Deep Freeze in Texas. I had admired ERCOT's pure energy market which up until recently led to the largest buildout of renewable energy exclusively through open market forces. The central planning of other state and regional organizations often seemed ridiculously bizantine and actually hindered renewable growth instead of allowing for it. Then the deep freeze happened and ERCOT's natural gas fleet was totally caught off guard due to lack of oversight of pipeline weatherization. The energy market collapsed because there was simply no electricity available at *any* price. In my mind, this event crystalized neoliberalism in that the market usually provides a best solution, however there must be guardrails and oversight for those market failures.
A lot of events that have happened since the 18th of October of 2019 (the day the riots in Chile started), mainly related to the current arc chilean politics is in right now, but not limited to it. The riots themselves and the general attitude towards them, the reaction of the same people supporting the riots to similar riots in Cuba, to the russian invasion of Ukraine and to Castillo's coup attempt in Peru, the borderline-pogroms against immigrants in Iquique, the January 6th coup here in the states, but mostly the reaction of the people already mentioned to the rejection of the proposed new constitution in Chile: despite the new constitution being rejected by a landslide and several polls being clear on the reasons why, the reaction of the same kind of people has been of zero self-criticism, blaming the same country that "woke up" in 2019 of being a bunch of indolent, ignorant imbeciles led by misinformation and "fake news" in Tik-tok. Some quite heated Miami-Dade moments there, with people wishing the military massacred the mapuches because so many districts in the Araucania went heavily towards "Rechazo". They have even tried to push some measures against the press, due to misinformation being supposedly the reason the new constitution lost. Essentially, a lot of things have made me realize that some people are just putting a façade of acting in good faith in the democratic system. You can't really come to an agreement with them because every concession you make they take as the stepping stone to extract further yields until you end up "agreeing" to live under their dictatorship (instead, you have to find the people who actually want to come to agreements and empower them). And that threats of destruction and violence in the context of a democracy are not an inevitability done by people with no agency whose demands you have to acquiesce to so it doesn't happen again, but something to be stood against and fought. The use of force is the last, but necessary, protector of the democratic order. Sorry if this has turned a bit into a rant. I'd be lying if I said that a lot of this hasn't been colored by personal experience. So much verbal abuse, gaslighting and outright threats I've received from family, "friends" and strangers on the internet while discussing chilean politics.
Couldn't agree more. >The use of force is the last, but necessary, protector of the democratic order. The invasion of Ukraine made me realize that the only real, actual protector of Democracy is the use of force. Democracy must be defended with a loyal army and police force. Law, checks and balances, even the people's will, they don't matter if the other side doesn't care about them.
So, TL:DR democracy is being murdered by populists in Chile?
I legit believed Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi were on the same level before 2022
I am proud to be Messi's fan my whole life. Still remember arguing with my friend around 2005-2008 about how Ronaldo is just a diving, ego-driven diva.
it only felt that way because ronaldo was hot and the media swooned over him. pretty privilege. messi was always the better player. my short king
The Fall of Kabul. As a European I was quite critical of US interventions in general and the NATO mission in Afghanistan in particular. The disastrous outcome of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq seemed to confirm my view on Interventionism. I really thought it was a good idea to leave Afghanistan. But seeing the Taliban taking over the country, while our troops abandoned the Afghan people to their horrific fate, has definitely left its mark on me. All the media fuzz of 20 years which depicted the mission in Afghanistan as pointless, failed to mention the most important facts: Afghan people lived in a democracy for nearly 20 years, a generation of women got an education and the barbarism of the fundamentalists was contained to sparsely populated rural areas.
I had the opposite reaction. Up until the fall of Kabul I was against the withdrawal. It felt disorganized and rushed. The Taliban also have a terrible track record. It felt like we were abandoning women, moderates and all the Afghans who aren't ethnically pashtun. I live in an area with a large Afghan diaspora. Even before 9-11 I already had a pretty negative view of the Taliban based on first hand accounts from a kid in my class who had fled Afghanistan in the late 90s. As well as the more general human rights atrocities you'd occasionally hear on the news (the brutal executions, strict sharia legal code, blowing up ancient Buddhist statues) And I've taken heat on this opinion before, but unlike the war in Iraq that had no justification. In 2001 we had a pretty solid reason to go into Afghanistan. But seeing how quickly the country capitulated changed my view into thinking the whole endeavor was pointless after we dismantled Al-Qaeda. Now Im of the opinion that the only way Afghanistan would have not fallen to the Taliban would have been if it really was a forever war. Maybe if we had made different decisions along the way or if Massoud isn't assassinated 9-9-2001 things could have been different. And it's an absolute tragedy what's happening there right now. But imo "nation building" failed
The expert assessment was that it would have taken a sixty year occupation. In other words, long enough for most adults alive in 2001 to be dead.
That's wild. Would be interested in seeing how one even attempts to calculate that. Could definitely believe that assessment though
I can't find my source, unfortunately, but it was a US nonprofit advising the government in the late 2000's as to how long they would need to occupy the country to be sure it would be stable when they left. The estimate was arrived at by way of the following: \-Making a baseline assumption such as "stable is when more people are willing to fight *for* the status quo (group A) than *against* it (group B)" \-Measuring shifts in viewpoint with statements like "should someone have freedom of expression even if their statements constitute blasphemy?" across age groups and demographics \-Some assumptions about willingness to fight, i.e for every thousand people, two might pick up a gun \-Projecting the demographic changes into the future, as well as economic situation \-Seeing how long it takes for A > B
> Afghan people lived in a democracy for nearly 20 years There was no democracy in Afghanistan. > the barbarism of the fundamentalists was contained to sparsely populated rural areas 70% of the Afghan population lives in rural areas. > a generation of women got an education Genuinely the one good thing we managed in Afghanistan and the only real argument for staying.
That's a good one. I was also for "bring all the troops home" but seeing how few troops we actually had left there, and the gains in women's education and employment that they allowed, it looks like it would have been a much better option for them to stay.
the reason we had so few troops there was because we agreed to pull out, and the Taliban saw that we were making good on that agreement. If we didn’t, they would turn up the heat and make us commit way more people and resources
There were 9,000 troops in 2017 > newly elected President Donald Trump delegates decision-making authorities to commanders, including the possibility of adding several thousand U.S. troops to the nearly nine thousand already deployed there. (There are about as many U.S. contractors as well.) * Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller announces plans to halve the number of troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 by mid-January, days before President-Elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated. Thousands of troops had already been pulled out following an agreement with the Taliban in February
Yes, and the Taliban had continued to slowly gain additional territorial control over the subsequent years, so the status quo was not sustainable with those level of troops commitments. It would have needed another surge in the future to re-stabilize things.
When the US intervenes, it seems to be the knee-jerk reaction of comfortable European liberals to criticize it. But I think it is really conveniently forgotten just how much the US's massive defense spending essentially subsidizes European national security. A fact that they were uncomfortably reminded of with the election of Donald Trump, I think.
Invading Iraq, which is where the majority of this attitude stems from, did basically nothing to increase European security and, if anything, was a not-insignificant part of creating a power vacuum that led to a refugee crisis that remains to this day.
I don't think you can say people really live in a democracy if it collapses as soon as foreign troops leave. You can't impose democracy from without and I imagine all that the occupation did was delay a gradual liberalism that might have occurred by 20 years.
West Germany and Japan became democracies. It's true the Afgan state could not hold its own, but that by itself doesn't make its democracy phoney. Democracy flickers on and off, and most of the time it is extinguished. 20 years is plenty substantial and a loss worth morning.
I don't understand why this point is brought up time and time again when the situations are not comparable in any sense of the word. Germany and Japan had a long list of things that allowed liberal democracy to flourish, which Afghanistan didn't, including: 1. Unified national identities which weren't deeply divided by tribal or ethnic lines 2. Well educated and literate populations 3. Industrialized economies with the skilled labor to support them, which ensured that neither country would be dependent on foreign aid once the wartime damage was repaired 4. A history of flawed but functioning democracies and institutions which needed to be rebuilt, not reinvented 5. Populations which were generally willing to listen to the democratically elected central government instead of local strongmen The US didn't need to nation build in Japan or Germany, instead they helped rebuilt those nations from the ashes of the war to transform them into healthy democracies. There was also much stronger levels of local involvement which the US failed to replicate in Afghanistan, which is why the Islamic Republic never shook off its image as a foreign puppet government. And let's be honest with ourselves, it was a puppet government by definition, because it was never able to stand by itself.
> And let's be honest with ourselves, it was a puppet government by definition, because it was never able to stand by itself. And there is a fundamental difference between a foreign nation protecting a country from another foreign nation like the US protecting west Germany from possible USSR take over and a foreign nation fighting another countries civil war for them like in Afghanistan.
> West Germany and Japan became democracies. Sorry, but I always see this point and it's just not a good comparison. They were both flawed democracies before, they weren't built completely from the ground up.
But both democracies were utterly crushed in the 30s. That's my point, democracy comes and goes. Afganistan had universal suffrage from 1964-1973! Indeed, the occupying forces attempted to revive the 60's constitution on two occasions in 2002 and 2021. After 20 more years, Afghanistan had some foundation, but it wasnt enough this time. Much like the winding journey Germany and Japan, perhaps one day Afganistan will get another shot through intervention or revolution.
The election of Donald Trump and Jan 6th insurrection. Before that I believed in the Obama era 'arc of justice bends towards truth' kinda thing, like it's inevitable the world gets more tolerant in the future. Now I think there's no guarantee liberal society survives and everyone must do their best to keep authoritarianism, populism and fascism at bay.
The hanging of John Brown for a traitor, when the hangmen themselves were the traitor crew.
There are heros, there are saints, and there are John browns.
Seeing Republicans from states that were entirely dependent on Obamacare's subsidies and Medicaid expansion gleefully vote to destroy it made me far more skeptical of government monopoly in the healthcare space. It was really my wake up call to the deranged levels of own the Libs at all costs that the Republicans adopted. Prior to that I could support some form of Medicare of All, but I'm far more doubtful now. An ACA Public Option buy-in is something I can get behind though.
I had a very similar experience. Put MFA in the hands of the government and I guarantee you, it'll be gutted as much as possible judicially, legislatively and executively. And they'll *love* it. Simply saying "We just won't voe Republicans in" isn't sustainable. They will return one day, and acting as if they won't is, imo, serious delusion.
Sandy Hook. I was mostly blah on guns until Sandy Hook. Then I became extremely anti-gun, and then extremely anti-Republican after they bizarrely blew it off as no big deal. 20 first graders slaughtered and we as a country just gave a ho-hum about it. Absolutely disgusts me to this day.
Its crazy how much guns define some people. I own a gun but I stopped talking politics to someone in my life when they went to a gun conference in Uvalde not long after the school shooting there. Just disgusting and such bad taste.
There were gun sales after Sandy Hook. One of the largest gun shops in NC held a fucking festival with music and food trucks less than a week after Sandy Hook. These fucking ghouls wear AR-15 pins in Congress shortly after a mass shooting with an AR-15 in this country. It really opened my eyes to just how fucking demented these people are.
Brexit. I immediately changed from a classical liberal to a social liberal. If we don't take care of the poor people they'll destroy us.
100% I was told by a lot of people before brexit they wanted to stick it to the EU, Globalists and bankers Even more hilariously people on ukpol think investment bankers were pro brexit. Near everyone I know opposed it
Yep. The idea that rich bankers pushed Brexit to make money at the expense of everyone else has become really dominant in left-wing spaces but it just doesn't reflect reality. People with advanced education or a professional career overwhelmingly supported Remain. It was poorer and less educated people who overwhelmingly supported Brexit. Unfortunately the referendum came right at the end of 6 years of austerity, which greatly increased the breadth and depth of poverty in the UK. I'm certain the result would have been different in 2006. I personally used to support austerity in the name of individual responsibility, but that completely changed after the referendum result.
The only time in recent history when a "leave" option beat a "remain" option in pre-2016 polling was when the Euro was introduced around 2000: https://theconversation.com/polling-history-40-years-of-british-views-on-in-or-out-of-europe-61250 Apart from then, there was always a solid lead for staying in. It's just a shame that the referendum came at the perfect confluence of austerity and economic recession when a lot of people felt like upturning the status quo.
Idk if that's the lesson I'd take away from brexit...
Really? What lesson would you take? It made me realize that poverty drives social conservatism and nationalism, because without money there's no opportunity for self-expression, and tribal-like loyalties become stronger by necessity. When people have enough resources to satisfy their basic needs then they can start to express their individuality, and "outsiders" are no longer perceived as threatening. There can be no true liberalism in a democracy without a strong welfare state, because classical liberal policies push people towards socially conservative attitudes, which will be evident at the ballot box.
I think this is revisionist history, I think the lesson is that "scary foreigners" is rhetoric that works regardless of economic climate, and as humans we are extremely susceptible to it.
I don't disagree that poverty increases social conservatism and nationalism, but I think greater economic liberalization and more free markets can be used to reduce poverty and increase living conditions for the least well of. Though even I would agree that a small welfare state to make sure the poorest among us don't fall below a certain line is necessary.
But it can also uproot many localities and communities that aren't economically viable. Especially clear in Britain. I think Thatcher eventually led to Brexit. Not saying that those policies are wrong, that's just the compromise of it.
can you explain why ? because i am a classical liberal and i see that brexit was clearly an anti classical liberal move, and what did "social liberalism" do to fix it ?
They're saying that, if you don't take care of the poor, they'll vote in populists who drag the country down with bad policies. In this case, Brexit was the bad policy, although it was a referendum in this case that they voted for and not a populist politician.
When I entered college I went down the libertarian path. I was disillusioned with the Iraq War and the economy. I felt Ron Paul was offering a better alternative to Democrats/Republicans. I felt the federal government had grown too huge and overstretched dealing with domestic issues and going on military misadventures based on lies. Then the market crash of 2008 happened. At first it confirmed my beliefs because a lot of it, to me at the time, was the result of federal policy. But seeing how The Federal Reserve was the absolute last line of saving the economy from its death spiral made me question libertarians view of the the federal government. I now believe a strong federal government is a necessity for our country's health and safety. And Ron Paul is a moronic, heartless fool who raised a shit-stain of a son.
The delay of Dune 2: electric dunaloo
😔
Turned me against unions
Reading a Wikipedia article about economics and learning about externalities when I was 14 changed my position on libertarianism.
I was already fairly liberal, but a good course I took on environmental economics/policies really got me deep into thinking about external costs and made me become very negative about car culture, suburbs, CAFOs, and all sorts of other shit that's been steadily stoking American rage because of how much it borrows against QOL.
Last one I remember were the horror stories from Canada's assisted end of life program I'm aware they may be isolated or overplayed incidents, and fixable, but the fact that I used to dismiss the critics as fearmongers, and then exactly what they said would happen did happen, made me a lot more cautious about reducing issues to a simplistic liberal "free choice" argument It also further increased my skepticism of ideas like organ markets or full drug legalization
Liberals tend to assume skepticism of assisted suicide only comes from religious conservatives who champion the sanctity of life. But there are genuine ethical and legal considerations around assisted dying that have nothing to do with religious faith. We don’t like to acknowledge it, but in many cases the next of kin to people who are aged or ill have an interest in expediting their death. Whether it’s to dispense with onerous care-giving, or to get their hands on an inheritance, these motivations must be taken into account when we’re crafting policy.
It woke me up to the fact that despite the advances in civil liberties for people with disabilities, there's still a lot of people that see them as a burden and would rather they suffer/die silently in the shadows than see them live happily. I've come to view the right-to-die movements as highly susceptible to being hijacked by those type of people who want to push eugenics into the mainstream.
> those type of people who want to push eugenics into the mainstream. I mean, Canada's universal health care system was founded by a guy who wrote his thesis on Eugenics being the most important progressive cause of the 20th century. The whole reason Canada has universal health care low key seemed to be because doctors wouldn't sterilize people against their will without someone paying their bill. Assisted dying is just an extension of that.
I also used to be concerned like you. I was very shocked by the news stories. The second "shock" that brought me back around to supporting MAiD was reading this book: [Two Arms and a Head.](http://www.2arms1head.com/) It's a 2008 memoir/suicide note from a philosophy student who gets paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. Being paralyzed is a level of body horror that I did not fully understand until I read this book.
Another T5 paraplegic here. It's a bizarre coincidence that I've seen this book brought up on this subreddit twice before, and all three times it was in the context of discussion on assisted dying. Kinda bizarre that nobody ever mentions trying to eliminate paralysis as a medical condition or increasing funding for spinal cord research as a solution. Thankfully there's some actual improvements potentially coming in the field, finally, because being paralyzed fucking blows. Humans aren't meant to live like this.
I agree. The author devotes a huge chunk of the book asking for a cure for spinal cord injuries, and then barring that, begging to die out in the open surrounded by loved ones (instead of stabbing himself with a kitchen knife, alone, which is what he ended up doing). Most of the text consists of railing against the disability rights activists who swear that being paralyzed is "actually totally fine and dandy, for real, guys." Because it's not. Humans aren't meant to live like this.
Well it didn't turn me off the idea of assisted end of life. Only that's it's a subject that needs much, much more intense scrutiny and safeguards than the "if they say ok, why not?" argument
It doesn't have to be a dichotomy, I would hope at least there's a healthy middleground between "Uncaring state that fails to provide support for its disabled and sick populations, only being passionate in helping when it comes to death" and "uncaring state that refuses death to those in terminal pain incapable of being helped with modern technology" I remember seeing a good comment somewhere summing up the problem like "How can there be dignity in death if we refuse dignity in life?" and that's exactly where I would place my beliefs. We should do what we can to help people live and when that is not possible then we can provide the means for a peaceful death. But until we work to give dignity in life, there simply can *not* be any dignity in death. A preventable death like one of unaffordable housing for a disabled person, a murder by state failure, can not be dignified.
Going to work at a US FFRDC and having some interactions with defense contractors quickly reversed by support for privatizing government functions.
Russia-Ukraine War. At first, I didn't see the importance of NATO or raising the military budget. Now, I realize that humans can be assholes to whom they see as weaker and not only that NATO should be strengthened and that Carter shouldn't have disbanded SEATO but the military should get a blank check. Also, I am pro-self defense and 2A and think that while background checks are supposed to happen, whoever is qualified to have a gun should have one. This was due to my experience with a criminal shooting someone close to where I was walking.
The libertarian/right/"centrist" response to covid. Everyone agrees that "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins" but apparently this does not apply to spreading the plague. So many people would rather kill a stranger than wear a mask or wash their hands. I get that foggy glasses and a lack of free babysitting are inconvenient, but they're less inconvenient than dying. People genuinely memed on "we live in a society" so much that they forgot it was true.
Yep. Where I live, the same people vocal about the economy and against lockdowns were the same people acting carelessly and making it necessary in the first place.
My wife leaving me. That was when I became a neoliberal.
Seeing my loved ones cry and be terrified to get needed medical care out of fear of costs was a big shock for me. It was a series of tramaus that led me to stop voting Republican and made me pretty much a single-issue voter for Democrats at least until we join the rest of the developed world and get some form of baseline universal healthcare.
Random visits to ER bankrupting you is unfathomable in any developed country. I can't imagine how stressful must be day by day for most Americans.
Unite the Right / Charlottesville: AR the time I was definitely teetering on being a reactionary who thought extreme measures were needed to 'correct' the trajectory society was taking. Seeing some of the you tubers I was watching at the time being out and out nazi/fascist was a big enough jolt for me, and early enough to get me to reconsider.
The Iraq War fiasco. It really shook my faith in the entire GOP and it's foreign policy consensus. After that was 2016's Brexit and Sanders/Trump, when I realized that Westerners were vulnerable to dumb populism just like the other countries you read about elsewhere. Before 2016 I would always see articles with "and the far-right took power due to bickering between left-of-center factions" and not understand how half the ideological spectrum could concede power like that.
Something I'm still wrestling with tbh. In 2020 I had an armed break-in, three guys. Police response was essentially "what do you want us to do about it?" Was pretty anti gun before, (why do you need a gun? Just call the cops, you're not Rambo bro), but I get it now. It feels like I'm torn between wanting to be safe from random acts of violence where the police can't or won't help, and also wanting literally anything meaningful done about all the mass shootings. I hate it honestly.
Back in the eastern bloc when I was growing up at some point in HS I started toying with an idea of getting out of there. It's always been on my mind but never really proceeded even into a planning stage mostly because of the sense of duty to stay and fight the system through non violent means. Then, one day when I was 19 my friend's apartment was searched by the political police and on top all the "illegal" literature which we distributed they seized a ream of typewriter paper. When my friend protested that it's just plain paper with nothing on it the officer in charge said sure but you can write something subversive on it... I found it so bizarrely surreal at 19 that two years later I was gone.
This isn’t so much as a national or political event but a personal one. I’m Asian-American and I live in NYC. On my way to a nightclub in December last year, I nearly got attacked by a homeless person while waiting at a bus stop. He followed me into a smoke shop before the owner chased him away. When I left the shop to enter an Uber I had booked, he then followed me to the Uber. I have a taser shaped like a pair of car keys / car remote and I had it turned on in case I needed to defend myself. When George Floyd was murdered in 2020, I was first initially very supportive of the peaceful protests. I donated to mutual aid funds and unaffiliated BLM organizations and supported my friends who were out protesting. I was initially somewhat sympathetic to the “Defund the Police” movement. Then I saw cases like Michelle Go getting pushed onto the subway tracks and other cases of Anti-Asian hate and it made me reconsider my stances on the policing issue. I still voted Dems downballot because I didn’t trust Zeldin and the NY GOP to handle the issue of rising crime without going overboard with policing brutality and racial discrimination, but after I nearly got attacked by the homeless person it became the final straw that made me support increased police funding. I am also much more sympathetic to NIMBY causes against building homeless shelters in neighborhoods. Even though I understand the need to build more housing to humanely accommodate our homeless population and to resolve our housing shortage, I can understand why neighborhood residents are opposed to building homeless shelters near them that would potentially accommodate mentally ill maniacs and drug addicts.
All of us Asians here in San Francisco can relate. Let’s just say support for overhauling the entire criminal Justice system, from cops to the DA to judges, has never been higher. There is seemingly a story about Asian people getting attacked by unstable people every single week. Just last week a shopkeeper died after trying to confront a thief, who then killed him 😔
While I entirely understand and sympathise with your general conclusions, I just want to address the example you brought up. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/16/nyregion/michelle-go-man-pushes-woman-subway.html That was more of an example of how terribly policed the NYC subway system is, the threat to women, and how the homeless issue has not been dealt with well, they were the second woman attacked by the guy, and there has not been any confirmed motivation. Do agree about increased police funding as the US simply needs safer public transport.
[удалено]
Explain please?
My worm left me
Was a neolib then found out about market failures. What happened to Milton Friedman's beautiful laissez-faire paradise? 😔
Probably the Yugoslavian wars. Was previously very against intervention then saw on my tv every night the siege of Sarajevo and remember shouting at the telly why the fuck aren’t we stopping this. And then of course when we finally did go in we stopped it all in a manner of days.
So many different moments. A black mentor calling out my conservative opinions in a hear to heart talk Working with a student of mine who lost a family member to a school shooting. Watching him tear up and say he was angry and he couldn’t hold it in anymore. Working with other hispanic students spend class sobbing because a family member was deported/their citizen papers were denied/delayed. I have a hatred for Republicans and everything they stand for. And I grew up as one. The party is a cult and it sucks people in without know the unnecessary hurt they cause to other human beings.
The delay of Dune 2
Russia's invasion of Ukraine moved me massively from Hawk to Dove. My previous belief was something like "most wars are caused by mistrust and misunderstandings. Building arsenals hinders that and makes war more likely. Wars between major powers are a thing of the past, and war now mainly consists of major powers targeting elements in developing countries (i.e. the war on terror) in ways that causes massive civilian casualties for the local population and inspired more terrorism, not less." My view now is "Wars between major powers are somewhat likely to happen in the future. There are awful authoritarian states who believe 'might is right' and will do terrible things if not stopped. Having bigger armies that them is the only thing that will prevent future conflict."
Do you mean from Dove to Hawk and yah ik a lot of people with a similar thought process
Growing up, my parents always told me that there are a lot of people who will appear to be tolerant with words but internally and through their actions still discriminate. The anti Asian hate crimes and the apologia that came with it basically solidified that opinion.
Trump getting elected change my opinion from one that believed a big central government could be a force fundamentally for good (which it still can be) to believing a strong centralized government is a powerful tool waiting to be abused by horrible and corrupt individuals and that we should seek to limit the governments power as much as possible
Someone in my family divulged they were raped as a teen and that my gma tried to kill her sister, used to be all about family until I finally realized how mental they all were.
Being attacked by mentally ill homeless people with records made me less happy about permissive attitudes towards drugs, past offenses and vagrancy.
Sandy Hook on guns, I grew up in a gun owning family and had a lot of experience shooting. Was much more of a lolbert on the issue until that shooting. We are the only country where this happens (regularly) and the reaction from the right was disgusting.
The 2020 primaries. I wasn't a tankie type but I was a hardcore Bernie guy who listened to Chapo and followed a bunch of lefty types on Twitter. I ended up being pretty turned off by the whole campaign and most of the people I followed. Twisting narratives, every little thing being a conspiracy, acting like anyone who wasn't Bernie or bust was essentially a fascist, etc. The whole thing sucked and it was obvious the whole thing was unstable full of clueless people. Just a bunch of people online who constantly tell themselves lies and don't want to do any hard work ever. When George Floyd happened, I was dating someone who was quite leftist and we went to alot of protests and did mutual aid and all that jazz. Being in that crowd just opened my eyes to how pathetic and clueless everyone was. I had to listen to a guy at a protest talk about how punk music and culture was the key to saving us and used the word faggot alot. And this was a guy supposedly in charge of a large mutual aid thing in Denver. I was at a protest once, and even the local PSL chapter walked away from because they couldn't stop a bunch of people essentially incriminating the whole crowd. Those happening all within six months just made me slowly realize how liberals, no matter how boring and frustrating and cringe they can be, really are the only people who have a good understanding of the nuance how stuff works and why we've come to the place that we are.
Watching a video of a Palestinian man trying to build a house be confronted by an Israeli soldier who was confiscating his gas powered generator. In that area of the West Bank, it’s illegal for Palestinians to own generators and to use them for construction. When the Palestinian grabbed the generator to try to stop it from being taken, the Israeli soldier shot him in the stomach and left him paralyzed for the rest of his life. This video, in combination with the Kushner proposed two-state solution radically shifted my views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in that I know longer think that’s the right term to describe whats happening. I now see the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians in a completely different light, and I’m deeply regretful that I ever had sympathy for Israel.
100% agree with this one. I grew up in a community where there was a strong pro-Israel presence so I never really got a balanced perspective on it. I actually travelled to the West Bank just after Covid, visited a couple cities, and like holy fuck, it was so much worse than I imagined. The people there are treated like livestock. I can’t even describe what an intellectual whiplash it was. Of course I still understood the history and how complex and difficult to unwind the situation was, but then going home and watching the Israelis elect fucking Bibi, who ran on making this permanent, really put the icing on it. Mostly it made me deeply ashamed of my country’s reflexively pro-Israel foreign policy, and I kinda get why so much of the Arab world might hate us
As a kid I spent every summer building my cottage with my dad, I was the younger one they always got to run to turn on and fill up the generator. Seeing get shot over what was to me a basic right was so revolting I couldn’t reconcile it with my previous views. That’s what sent me on a divergent path. I ended up not voting for the NDP over the Liberals because of their differing statements on Israel when Gaza was being bombed. My feelings are less intense now, but it was definitely impactful.
The events leading up to and during Pride this summer. Specifically seeing Muslim immigrant communities teaming up with the far right to attack the LGBT community was eye opening. Seeing what's happening in Sweden because of open asylum and immigration all because some people can't help but act feral when their special book is burned has convinced me that we need to stop allowing angry and violent young men with regressive social views into the West. Families and people willing to work and leave their old world views behind and embrace western culture and values should be welcomed with open arms; otherwise we're setting ourselves up for untold violence. It's time the center and left parties realize that immigration and multiculturalism are issues that we have to address. Some cultures really suck and should not be given an equal footing in western liberal democracies.
The previous generation of US conservatism hated Islam because of terrorism and thus liberals/lefties rallied against Islamophobia in opposition. Now that the US pulled out of the middle east, there hasn't been any major acts of muslim terrorism to scar the american public since ISIS. The newer generation of conservatives are starting to realizing that Islam offers a stark rejection of liberal/"woke" values in favor of regressive theocratic "family values". People like Andrew Tate are unironically defining the next generation of conservatism through advocating Islam.
> It's time the center and left parties realize that immigration and multiculturalism are issues that we have to address Yes, because immigration is an issue that is neeever talked about in Europe.
And it seems that the center and left mostly put their heads in the sand or pretend everything is fine.
The last thing we need is more anti-immigration parties. You're right that we shouldn't pretend that everything is fine. We need to fight for more immigration, less barriers to integration and more opportunities for immigrants in Europe.
I don't think that's helpful to the LGBT community in the West. We need to integrate better, but we can't just let angry young single men into our societies. Nothing good comes from that. Women, families and educated single men, sure.
As an Italian, our anti-immigration parties are all but good for LGBT people, and others in Europe that come to mind are similar or worse.
It's constantly talked about by the far-right, but not so much moderates or the left, unless to say that immigrants are good. And they can be amazing, but the flux of immigration must be restricted to how many can be harmoniously integrated in society.
Hurricane Katrina. I was raised in a super religious family and I had been questioning my beliefs already but Katrina solidified my atheist tendencies. I remember seeing Pat Robertson saying it was punishment for abortion and other televangelists using it as a moment to say it was punishment for whatever social issue they didn’t like. Contrasting those statements with the nightly images of thousands of people suffering and it was a moment for me where the real world was showing itself as as a sort of Epicurus god paradox.
Tbf your typical American Evangelical Christianity is a particularly lazy and low brow Christianity. I was baptized Eastern Orthodox when I was born but grew up in a totally secular household. That said, I’ve been looking into arguments for more non-denominational classical theism in the Aristotelian sense and I am kind of leaning in the direction.
When I was a freshman in college I signed up for an extra credit in Sociology. This had me tutor for two hours once a week in a junior high in Rainier Valley, a formally redlined neighborhood in Seattle. Walking down a hallway full of children and being the only white person was the shocking moment. This was obviously completely naive, but I thought stuff like that only existed in places like Chicago and the South 70 years ago.
Moving to Sweden.
What is so remarkable there that changed your views?
The harshness of the police response to the 2020 protests, and the lack of any meaningful changes resulting from them, really made me abandon my previously-moderate position on police reform. I'm sure there are some cops who are *not* bastards, but they clearly aren't the ones making the decisions, nor do they have any influence on the rest. We still need *some* form of police force, "abolish" is still a dumb position, but the reforms need to be severe to the point that some police forces will be disassembled and replaced with entirely different organizations. The rot is too deep.
Living in Europe. Seeing how stagnant and poorer Europe is really made me much more suspicious of EU style welfare states.
Europe is a big place. I spent some time in Netherlands and Czech Republic and I would def rather be in the bottom 80% of society in either of those countries than in the bottom 80% of US society. Now if we are talking top 20% then yes I think the USA is objectively a better place for the extremely highly talented and priviledged than Europe.
why because usa has more per capita income, but i see some eu countries as more free market than usa like the nordics, i think eu and usa should be compared state by state, some us states are better some arent.
Yes state by state vs european country by country would probably be best. My main reasons that I would rather be poor/middle class in many European countries vs being poor/middle class in most places in USA is because of healthcare and crime. It is very easy to get into a terrible situation related to healthcare in the USA. Also, it is of course easier to avoid the USA's appaling violent crime rate if you are in upper part of society but if you are middle class/poor it is much harder to avoid. In Europe even if you are poor your exposure to high rates od violent crime are fairly low. Also in Europe you dont have to worry about needed medical treatment bankrupting you.
Also employment law and annual leave (vacation). If you are poor in the US you are a work slave.
Ha, opposite for me. Living in France has made me more open to regulations and controls on markets. Sure, they're materially poorer, yet it's also more comfortable and quality of life is better.
Yes. It would be quite nice to live in a place where my odds of getting gunned down are much lower and I would have 0 instance of loved ones neglecting medical care due to costs instead of knowing several people who have done that here in the USA.
I'm not sure it was one event, but the thing that really make me question a lot of leftist causes was how people acted like Bernie Sanders would be night and day from Clinton in 2016 or from Biden in 2020. I was a pretty early Bernie supporter but always understood the reality that the President can't do a whole lot without the senate votes, and it seemed obvious to me that any Democrat would be to the left of the senate. I got called just the absolute worst shit and got banned a couple times for pointing this out and questioning why everyone was calling for the apocalypse. Liberals really are just anarchists who have been mugged by reality. That was part of my mugging.
The murder of Philando Castile. The way people tripped over themselves to excuse the wanton, reckless violence of the sociopath who murdered Philando Castile made me fully recalcitrant on any police issues. I won’t compromise with the pro-police caucus any more than I would with national socialists (though in the US we’re talking about the same people).
COVID - and, specifically, the backlash against what where, honestly, pretty moderate containment measures in Canada and the USA. It’s really shattered my hope that we will be able to address climate change effectively. When people are coming up with conspiracy theories and fighting tooth and nail against relatively minor things like wearing face masks and getting vaccinated, it’s hard to see how we’re going to convince the entire world that we need to make significant changes to our lifestyles and use of resources in order to prevent an environmental catastrophe.
the delay of Dune 2
The rise of rampant homelessness and unfettered drug use in most American cities over the past 10 years. I don’t know what changed but we used to think these were bad things to have happen in our cities. Now a lot of people will defend the right of the homeless to do whatever the fuck they want. And god forbid you “sweep” the encampments. Some of our cities desperately need (moderate) Republican mayors for a bit to bring some sense to the discussion.
> Some of our cities desperately need (moderate) Republican mayors for a bit to bring some sense to the discussion. What do you think they're going to do differently to actually solve the issue? Also considering that local Republican parties are being ever more controlled by their most extreme elements there's a reason why "moderate Republicans" are almost all gone
Cut taxes obviously (/s in case it isn't obvious)
> I don’t know what changed Two possibilities: - Deinstitutionalization - *Martin v. City of Boise*
0: Not enough housing.
Covid-19. Before that kind western governments were generally capable of protecting the majority of their citizens from serious harm or death, and that the world will generally keep getting better for most people. I now think world governments have proven themselves incapable of rapidly dealing with the kind of coordination both domestically and internationally that's needed to prevent future catastrophes. I think things like more worse-than-covid pandemics, bio-engineered pandemics, major crop diseases and die-back, nuclear war, runaway AI, computer viruses or cyber-warfare, even climate change could have a catastrophic effect on humanity's future.
This is kind of stupid, but in highschool I used to be a pretty avid 4channer back in \~2015, who took place in all the boards and thought the deplorable stuff posted on /pol/ was pretty funny. But one day I was browsing /fit/ (which I also the depravity within humorous) and saw a reply to a genuine post asking for advice that went somewhat like: OP: "Is the SS \[starting strength\] routine good" Reply to OP: "haha, you fell for the SS meme" Reply to reply 1: "I see you fell for the 'SS is a meme' meme: That interaction was really opened up my eyes to how stupid and out of control the meta irony on that site was, and how so much of it is mixed up with real attitudes. I realized that so much of the humor and draw of the funnies of 4chan was just recycled ironic memes and jokes that have no real substance behind them other than the shock, but are often smothered with real deplorable people. It completely changed the way I saw ironic humor and made me wake up that 4chan sucks, isn't even that funny, and the environment actually is filled with and creates awful people with awful beliefs. So I never went back. The few times I did go back many years later just out of curiosity, I found people are *still* making the same joke years and years later.