Not quite, I still cared and I’ve personally written to congress about it. Surprisingly, I got a response. Unsurprisingly, the response I got was basically a diplomatic “We know better than you do, we don’t care what you think, we’re going to do it anyway”
Many (but not all, it's worth noting) people who work for the government live in an apartheid society inside their own heads, where they and everyone else who works for government is the superior tier of their imaginary hierarchy, and everyone else is thought of as "lesser than", with fewer rights, a different (more strict) set of rules, on the inferior tier of their imaginary hierarchy.
Next time you're observing this, try to imagine the outrage if the government official were a white South African government official talking to a black South African citizen. There's the same level of condescending animosity and supremacist ideology at play, just along a completely different axis - employer rather than skin color.
Yeah I do imagine that on a regular basis yet, something about my comment appears to be unpopular since I’m being downvoted. I usually don’t mind but this one bothers me a little bit since writing to congress is just about the only thing an average American can do to influence the legislation. Actively participating in democracy is not cool these days.
The government colluded with Facebook and Twitter during the Biden administration
There's people that think this only happened during the Biden Administration?
Not Obama? Not Trump? Not Bush? Just Biden?
The gullibility of Americans in aggregate is stunning at times. If you're one of those still out preaching the quasi-religions of "left" or "right", you're honestly a large part of the problem at this point. And you're probably too submerged in the holy waters of your quasi-religion's divine scriptures to even begin to understand why.
While the OP may think that, you are assuming a lot about their thinking from those two sentences. Then somehow manage to generalize it to Americans and include religion.
I'd hazard a guess that the person you're responding to is not so naïve that they believe this was unique to the Biden administration, but rather, is frustrated at what they feel is this kind of government tyranny often only being discussed through a partisan, one-sided lens that they might characterize as emphasizing this kind of stuff when conservative administrations do it but downplaying when progressive administrations do it.
I'm not necessarily supporting or defending that position, but we should at least strive to argue against the steelman version of our opponent's position, rather than the strawman position, no?
We must have different definitions of steelman. I have always understood steelman to be the opposite of strawman. To argue with the strawman of their argument is arguing a weaker version of the argument than the one they're really making - i.e. "I assume because they didn't mention any other administrations, they must be some dumb idiot who only thinks this happened during the last administration", while arguing the steelman is arguing against the strongest version of the argument they're trying to make - i.e. "sure, that poster didn't mention other administrations, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt - if we asked them whether they'd support similar surveillance done by the Obama admin or Bush admin, I'd be willing to guess they'd say no, I bet they're just expressing frustration about the left's unwillingness to acknowledge the Biden admin's big tech collusion, even if their real qualm is with the surveillance itself, not the partisan coverage of it".
I personally detest covert surveillance and social influence operations being waged by taxpayer-funded organizations (regardless of whether public or private in nature) against their own citizenry, and I oppose this across the political aisle. I think it reeks of institutions that distrust and fear us more than they represent our collective interests, and that's an ugly mindset unbecoming of a government or enterprise that publicly paints itself as a champion of free and open democracy on the world stage, regardless of whether it's an intelligence agency or an international social media platform. But I also recognize that it's bipartisan, and that most people seem to care more about deploying force against the other side than they do about reducing the amount of force that is deployed against all of us.
ie - Strawman is to argue an easy to refute point they're not making. Whether that point is stronger or weaker is irrelevant. The key is you came prepared to refute the point. Steelman is to argue the point they're making.
But we're getting into irrelevant semantics at this point. Neither the poster's point, nor mine centered on the definitions we have of steelman or strawman.
My material point was on the tendency of people to embed what amount to using quasi-religious scripture quotations in discussions of completely non-religious problem areas. To the point of making it difficult for any, uh, "non-believers", out there to make any progress towards improvements.
> one-sided lens that they might characterize as emphasizing this kind of stuff when conservative administrations do it but downplaying when progressive administrations do it.
Conservative administrations are worst tho. That is the objective reality. And as of now, there is not left wing analogy to what conservatives are doing. Democrats are not perfect, but common, the aggression and fanatization of the actual party is not even close. It is moderate center on the "left side" vs the thing we see on the right.
One sided lens are the ones that achieve "equality" by euphemism away conservative goals and behaviors while trying to paint their opposition in worst possible light. Obama wore tan suit which totally breaks respectability of the presidency and therefore, he is equal to Trump who talks about "grabbing women by the <body part>" kind of false equality.
The strongest criticisms against the Obama administration weren't the juvenile tan suit tabloid pieces, it was when he reauthorized the illegal, warrantless mass surveillance of the American public and prosecuted whistleblowers after campaigning on protecting them. That, or drone striking the civilian weddings.
Those were wrong and bad and Democrats should be emotionally honest with themselves about that in the same way Republicans should be emotionally honest with themselves about the fact that laws criminalizing out of state abortions (like the one on the books in Oklahoma) are a reprehensible attack on some of the most foundational values of both western society and the American nation - freedom of movement and states only being allowed to regulate activity within their own borders. That Oklahoma law is more befitting of North Korea than Oklahoma, and Republicans should be as righteously indignant about this moral atrocity as they are about Obama drone bombing civilians.
We should all be honest with ourselves and with eachother when our elected officials do objectively bad things that violate human rights rather than expanding and upholding them. Less partisan mud slinging about dumb stuff like tour bus tapes and suit colors and more serious discussion about the wrongs actually happening, why the wrongs are wrong, and how to make them right.
Scott Pressler, a gay man, was almost single handedly responsible for swinging Pennsylvania, and therefore the 2024 election. He motivated 200,000 Amish to get out and vote after the FDA overeach tried to shut them down. MAGA loves their LGBT.
You are replying to someone who says they are transgender.
MAGA does not love trans people. Anti-trans rhetoric was thick during the campaign. Trans members of the military are being forced out. If you attempt to enter the US with a passport that indicates a different gender than you were assigned at birth, you might be banned from ever entering the US again. Significant effort has been taken to erase the concept of trans people from government websites and media.
A couple tokens does not change this. The actions speak for themselves.
That number can’t be true. His speciality is “legal ballot harvesting” so I suspect this story is parallel construction for where he really got 200,000 ballots.
"Both sides are the same" has no relevance anymore. Every day since Jan 20th 2025 one side has been proving they will do anything and everything they can to destroy democracy and America. The other side doesn't have any power to stop them, mainly because people didn't show up to vote.
Voting within the plurality system gave voters access only to the inputs of the Nash Equilibrium decision matrix, not the outputs. All it took was everyone being focused on winning by making the other side lose, and suddenly "we" all lose.
If instead we voted with permutations of {+1, +0.5, -0.5} assigned to a single combination of up to 3 candidates without duplication of score or candidate, we would be voting for the outcome of the decision matrix and avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
But we didn't, and won't, so we brave the new world of tragically aligned AGI known as government. If the pattern isn't recognized, real AGI (rather than the metaphor of government) would definitely learn from it and wipe out humanity at this rate.
>If instead we voted with permutations of {+1, +0.5, -0.5} assigned to a single combination of up to 3 candidates without duplication of score or candidate, we would be voting for the outcome of the decision matrix and avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
And if there were pies in the sky, nobody would go hungry.
Sorry, but you have to work with the system you have, not the system you want.
If more people showed up to vote, Republicans would have no power.
The only good path forward is to elect Democrats and then push them further left. Anything else is fantasy.
Maybe I am explaining poorly. When I say that they want them to "not exist" I don't necessarily mean that they will literally be killed (although I do worry that it might eventually come to that). I mean that they will be forced out of social visibility and effectively memory holed. To give some examples:
The right is passing laws saying that you can't teach about trans people or gender in schools. Part of the job of schools is to teach kids about the various important social/cultural/ideologies that make up the world; things like history, capitalism, communism, democracy, dictatorships, the various world religions, atheism, etc. Forbidding teaching of a major element of society like transgender people is in effect an attempt to erase them from social consciousness.
The right is passing laws anti-drag laws that define obscenity so broadly that it can be used as a threat to suppress drag performance. Attacking a culture's artistic movements is a classic way to attempt to suppress it from the public sphere.
Depends how it's taught. As a parallel example, it should be no problem to teach about Christianity in a school context, in terms of informing pupils that this is what many people believe. The problem is when the principles of Christianity are taught as if it is truth.
Same for gender identity and trans. It should be fine to inform pupils that some people in our culture believe that everyone has a gender identity, and that they also believe that this is what defines if someone is a woman or man or, as is described within this belief system, neither. But teaching this as if it's a fact is problematic.
A sensible policy would ensure that the curriculum is agnostic to these beliefs.
Because the responses I crafted myself to someone who uses a thought experiment starting with "it should be no problem to teach about Christianity in a school context, in terms of informing pupils that this is what many people believe." were less courteous than I wanted my posted response to be. Teaching anything about religion in public schools should be considered complicated, in my opinion. You are never just "informing pupils" in a public school setting and, as an example, if you botch your lesson on 9/11 you might get a muslim kid bullied or beat up. "But I simply informed the students that all of the terrorists who attacked the WTC were muslim! it is the truth after all!"
Furthermore, I had the gut reaction that your portrayal of how gender identity is taught in public schools is likely bad, but I did't have the time to run that stuff down. So as a consolation prize I offer one of GPT 4.5's takes on your response; Specifically I asked it to identify the hypocrisy in your response. I should probably have a more nuanced prompt in this case, and I would also encourage you to have a more nuanced view of teaching religion in public school.
No, given your characterization of the world in our previous interaction and willful ignorance of the challenges presented to you and your perspective, i don’t think you actually could or would use chatgpt in the manner i did here.
The hypocrisy in the comment lies in the author’s claim that others are acting in “bad faith,” while simultaneously misrepresenting the opposing argument. Specifically, the commenter criticizes the original poster for allegedly exaggerating (“malicious lie,” “breathless idiot”) when interpreting certain conservative actions as denying the existence of trans people. Yet, in doing so, the commenter engages in their own distortion—downplaying the genuine impact of policies that functionally erase or severely limit the recognition and legitimacy of transgender identities.
Moreover, the commenter clearly distinguishes between literal existence and societal allowance for billionaires, yet refuses to apply the same nuance to the original comment regarding transgender identities. This selective application of interpretative generosity constitutes the core hypocrisy.
Don't copy and paste ChatGPT at me please. It is amusing to me to see how poorly ChatGPT structures sentences and arguments. It must be trained almost exclusively on HR guidebooks and press releases.
We have to agree that Elon Musk is the ideological leader of the party now. He has arranged explanations for his own extreme and unambiguous statements. It’s noble to hold strangers on the Internet to a higher bar. But no idea in the party isn’t touched by Elon Musk.
So when he says “dead — killed by the woke mind virus” he might be trying to garner figurative sympathy as if he lost a child. It certainly coincides with a call to criminalize any facet of trans health care for trans youth.
And when he says “America will go bankrupt” without him, he might be issuing a threat or maybe just a warning. Donald Trump is no stranger to bankruptcy and certainly must see that politicians only mention debt rhetorically. His administration added more than $8T, or $5900 per capita per year.
So if we must accept only extreme solutions to things that were never problems, maybe their intention really was those urges?
