Hotter, Badder, and Unpopularer Takes

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Trump's obvious atheism is what gives me the most pause about my likely vote for him in 2020. A person with as much power as the US President needs to feel accountability to something greater than themselves.

And that something greater should be the US Constitution, the American people, and the rule of law.

I love the Constitution, but it can't love me back.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Your commitment to science is the problem, you dingus.

Well, it's either science or superstition. I'll choose science every time.

I hope you two have a great life together.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Religion is a remnant of our more primitive past, just like eating and sex. It's really time we get beyond that sort of thing.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Religion is a remnant of our more primitive past, just like eating and sex. It's really time we get beyond that sort of thing.

I know. I can't pass a flock of pigeons without them praying. And my cat keeps making offerings to it's saviour.

If only the poor beasts could science, they wouldn't need such superstitions

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

After 38 seasons, Survivor is still the most brilliant show on TV

I don't like it when they count seasons more than one per year.  Makes me feel really old.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Being eager to assume that another is lacking in empathy is actually evidence of a lack of empathy in oneself.    If you are empathetic, you try to understand the other person's viewpoint, which is impossible without first giving them the benefit of the doubt.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Having friends of a different race is better evidence of not being racist than claiming some abstract political view or allegiance.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

For supposedly being a more liberal and tolerant forum, Atlas is fairly Islamophobic,

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=114592.0

Holy sh!t look at BRTD throw down on that thread lol

"Negative. False religion, pedophile and murderer for a founder and continues to repress women and gays. Also bans alcohol consumption, that alone equals negative even if the rest was disregarded." BRTD  April 14, 2010

That certainly doesn't sound like something someone who's "all liberal, all the time" would say... is BRTD a fraud?!

What's non-liberal about that statement?

It's vastly overgeneralizing and stereotypical starters. Indian Flute inability to discern differences between practices and beliefs of second generation Muslims in Suburban Portland versus lobbyist in Saudi Arabia is quintessentially anti-liberal.

And incidentally, I'm a convert from Catholicism to protestantism, and your attitude towards Catholicism smacks of bigotry as well.

Indian flute music is great and has nothing to do with this.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Sinn Fein is more anti-Catholic than DUP these days.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

There is a very massive chasm lying in between the ideologies of Karl Marx and the ideologies of Vladimir Lenin, of which those 2 ideologies are wholly incompatible with each other.

Sadly, the same argument applies to Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand.

Does it? Serious question.

Paul Ryan calls himself a Christian; you can't really be an adherent to Objectivism and still be a religious person. One of Rand's core convictions was the rejection of the immaterial, and she agreed with Nietzsche on Christianity's immoral fetishization of selflessness.

I like Rand even though I disagree with her on a lot of things. Ryan, however, is just a hack who either didn't understand her work or is posing as a person of faith in order to score political points (both are plausible).

He said it influenced him, not that he's an Objectivist.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Everyone is learning disabled, some in ways that are statistically abnormal.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I have no idea what compels people to feel that they have to "give back" to their communities. Community organizers, community service, community activism... none of it makes sense to me. I cannot fathom why anyone would want to be in contact with their neighbors any more than they absolutely have to. I assume that anyone who does these things is either a liar or has an ulterior motive. Either they enjoy having the illusion of power (in the case of certain community positions), or they are being forced to do it for legal reasons. Mostly I assume that they're status-seekers and want to give off the appearance of being kind and virtuous people. I have no patience for anyone who invests that much time in trying to impress others, so I have deep disdain for anyone who does community service for this reason.

This is why I find Andrew Yang so heartbreakingly naive. He's said multiple times that if people have more money and thereby more free time, they'll spend that time volunteering. Every time he makes that claim, I have to suppress my laughter. You're going to give me $12,000 a year, and you expect me to... what? Volunteer at a soup kitchen? Sorry, but whether you give me twelve thousand or twelve million dollars, I'm still going to be the same person I always was. My time is way more valuable to me than the opinions of other people. I don't care if you volunteered to clean up a highway or flew to Ecuador to build houses for impoverished hill people. It's all just virtue-signaling.

Is it weird to think that people would care about the places where they live?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

John Dule’s, uh, thing is a major reason I turned against libertarianism.

Fair enough. It's a major reason I turned towards it.

If people can't count on action from their neighbors to help tackle problems in their community, that creates a bigger role for the state.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Marxism is just like Plato's Cave except that when you step out of the cave to experience a higher level of consciousness it's all dark except for some weirdo with a floodlight complaining about the bourgies.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The word "disabled" is much worse than "handicapped" or even "retarded" and it's nuts that it has become a standard way to refer to people.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The word "disabled" is much worse than "handicapped" or even "retarded" and it's nuts that it has become a standard way to refer to people.

The lesson here is how arbitrary what offends us is, honestly.

(Obviously in so far as we are literally just talking about the words)

What ends up happening with words is arbitrary in that whatever word gets used a lot for something perceived as undesirable will over time be seen as having a negative connotation, leading to a desire to replace that word.

But separate from that a particular word might have an impact on someone's self-conception - esp when it is a label expected to be adopted in order to receive accommodations that allow them to function in society.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The word "disabled" is much worse than "handicapped" or even "retarded" and it's nuts that it has become a standard way to refer to people.

It isn't. The standard is "person with a disability".

I'm not sure that makes much difference.  Saying either "I am disabled" or "I have a disability," literally means "I can't," not "I find it more difficult" or "I need extra help."
And that's how it gets translated into policy where "Disability" refers to benefits a person gets once they can prove they are completely incapable.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I won't clog up this thread too much responding to everything, but I am in no way "set in stone" on my opinion of him, and I will certainly do more research; I didn't even know who he was a few weeks ago.  However, from actual things I have heard him say so far, I have not gotten the impression he is intolerant or doing anything other than voicing his opinion that a desire for political correctness should never trump free speech ... and I largely agree with that, as do most mainstream liberals to my knowledge.  If my further research leads me to the conclusion of some of the posters here, I will obviously change my opinion.

He's a creative and eccentric person, and can get carried away on some points as creative eccentrics often do.  Some people have low tolerance for such things and so will dismiss him on that basis, but I think they are missing out on his broader contribution.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

most recruitment to the alt-right is ultimately a function of the Streisand Effect.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The beliefs that climate change/unsustainable crony capitalism will unleash massive global instability and, that sizable defense cuts are a good idea are inherently contradictory.

I guess that would depend on whether the military spending is geared toward the sorts of challenges we are likely to face over climate change.

My own unpopular take is that in order to mitigate and respond to climate change, we may need to become comfortable with a greater level of fiscal austerity, as the sort of economic growth required to fund high amounts of spending may prove either unobtainable or ecologically unsustainable.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

New age atheism like Dawkins, Harris, the late Hitchens, Bill Maher, etc.. seem to becoming an increasingly right wing reactionary group in this day and age as opposed to the liberals they were branded as in the 2000s

https://mobile.twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1228943686953664512
Sheesh I called that one

Dawkins has some weird and bad ideas but there's nothing really wrong with this tweet. Artificial selection HAS been been implemented for thousands of years to produce crops and genetic strains which are important for human agriculture since the agricultural evolution. Anyone who knows anything about genetics either recognizes that this is true or is too blinded by woke ideology to admit it.

It annoyed me how many people got offended by this tweet, claiming he was supporting eugenics, when he explicitly wasn't.

However it's not at all clear to me that the statement is true, or in what sense or under what conditions it could be true.  We aren't domesticated animals, and so the question arises how one might set up the sort of controlled reproduction and environment for humans that domesticated selection has relied upon.  It would seem to require a totalitarian system that actually succeeded in its aims beyond what any society has demonstrated.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Believing in freedom of movement is incompatible with believing that sub-Saharan Africa is "for" black people or North America should have been "for" First Nations people. The problem with the conquest of the Americas and the colonial empires of the more recent past was that the people who lived in these places were being subjugated to unaccountable foreign rulers who enacted genocidal policies against them, not the mere fact that new people were coming in.

i'm afraid that with a more amiable style of interaction, the initial death toll in the new world would have sadly still been nearly the same magnitude, given lack of immunity.  perhaps there could have been a way to avoid this but what i don't know.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

okay here's a good one:

Bill Cosby did more to fight racism in America than anyone since Nixon.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The political matrix should go from being a square to being a diamond. It's deranged otherwise.

Is the idea that one can be extreme on one-dimension, but not on both? 

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I get annoyed by how little coverage I see in the United States media of the plights of Native Americans compared to other minority groups.

They are a smaller group numerically in the US than blacks or Hispanics.  And Blacks, Hispanics, Koreans, etc. have neighborhoods where they make up a majority of the population in the big cities where the large news media organizations are based, but American Indians don't, so perhaps they are more easily forgotten.


anyway, welcome to the forum.  always nice to have another contrarian here!