And you’re the exact kind of leftist who creates the need for conservatives in the first place. You’re literally a perfect exhibit A.
I’ll happily admit that I think life is about balance and most of the time the right argument is in the middle if you frame the questions correctly. The biggest problem in politics at the moment is that we are arguing about stupid settled questions.
The right answer is somewhere between free markets and socialism, capitalism and communism, authoritarianism and libertarianism (used here correctly not as a straw man).
This might be a ymmv situation, but my mom actually does read the Bible, and I feel the only way I can respectfully reply without risking complete alienation, is by gently point out Biblical support for my position. I don’t think she will change her mind, but it’s going to be much harder for her to deny my arguments.
I have been really really struggling with this whole situation so I did what any responsible adult does and I got really drunk last night and spent the entire night absolutely roasting the remaining dumbfucks on my social media until about 2:30am. It was quite therapeutic and I also got the added bonus of waking up to a DM from a minority high school classmate I have not seen in 20 years reaching out in support of my actions. The time for civility is long past over and anyone who says anything remotely supporting the status quo, police or anti-protester needs to get shouted down and shamed. Not to change their mind but for the people reading what we write without even normally letting us know. Probably for a lot of us our most powerful voice is Twitter/FB/etc. as sad as that is.
you are about to be familiarized with the “taken out of context!!!” refrain they love to go to whenever confronted with Bible verses that conflict with their already held beliefs.
I don’t doubt you when you say your mom reads the Bible - I have met a few very “true” believers - but one pattern that holds absolutely consistent is that they never change their mind based on anything the Bible teaches, it’s always there to reinforce their already held beliefs.
I mean it’s been on display for 4 years now. If obama did any of the shit - i mean ANY of it - i mean stuff like, saying “shit” in a live press conference - the histrionics would go on for months. The holding the bible shit yesterday was basically blaspheming. They dont care. He’s dear leader, he could take a shit and wipe it with the bible and they would just say “well, he’s not perfect, but he’s our president.”
Do you know what your BMR is? Some people just have slower metabolisms. Some ways to increase metabolism are: Getting a good night’s sleep, high intensity cardio, lift weights, make sure you’re getting enough protein (can be hard on a vegetarian diet), drink lots of cold water, eat spicy foods, drink coffee and tea. But if you do this and keep it closer to 1800 calories hard to believe you won’t lose weight fwiw
In previous situations where change won out big time over stay the same and things went terribly wrong we have some bad land reforms in Africa, All of colonialism (where change was forced VERY quickly onto millions of people without any particular regard for how doing things the European way from now on would impact people locally), the Great Leap forward in China, most of the Russian experience, various crazy religious things that happened with the early Protestants after the Reformation (the Reformation is actually a great one to study on this subject), and yes if you decide to strip all of the ideology out of it and just make it change vs no change you’ve got the Nazi’s whole thing.
Change vs no change. Neither one is always right, but overall I tend to think change is +EV in every direction. I really like the idea of testing absolutely everything out at small scale and then adopting widely what works. That’s why I so dearly love finding policies that have worked in other places and recommending them for trial here. The Scandinavians really have home brewed a pretty lovely series of economic policies.
The big challenge we have as a species is how we go from the age of scarcity to the age of abundance without ending the world. Right now I’d say that if you drew the trend with a ruler we are well and truly fucked. Hopefully I’m right and this thing is cyclical and moves very fast in transition. We’re trying out extreme selfishness and mistrust at a global scale right now and I’m really hoping that we figure out how to move off it quickly and cleanly… but it’s really starting to look like it’s going to hurt a lot vomiting it up.
I also don’t think any of us are entirely pro change or no change. We’ve got individual issues where our views can be pretty nuanced. Still a useful framework for me at least.
We aren’t in an age of scarcity, even with 9 billion of us. This is one of the myths perpetuated by the right (for obvious reasons) that’s taken hold in people’s minds.
Yes that’s why I’m talking about the transition from the age of scarcity to the age of abundance. This is a new thing for the human race and we have absolutely no idea what it does to our understanding of society, and our culture around consumption is obviously really out of step with necessity now.
