@
SumKindaMunster So I can't really disagree with this, but I would say that the issue is less about absolute definitions and more about how the American political system is portrayed by Western Europe. [...] While some things would be nice, we aren't going to conform to Europeans definitions of their political systems applied to the US.
I'm not here trying to perpetrate the European colonization of America part II: Electric Bogaloo, if that's the concern. As I said, I'm just pointing out that the mere definitions of "left" and "right" are and need to be universal in order to have a talk about *any* political system. Whether we want to speak of the U.S., Russia, China, Italy, Canada, the U.K., the Martian Congressional Republic or the Romulan Empire, or whichever political system we may want to discuss. Just like the concepts of "North" and "South"; we'd have a problem if I arbitrarily decided to call "East" what you and everyone else call "North", in the name of "my country's geography is different".
Besides, as previously said, it's only/mostly post-Trump (2016) conservatives (and sympathizers) in modern day America that are more or less subtly pushing for this "remapping" of the political spectrum where the old right is now the "center", and the old center is now the "left" - so this isn't even really an Europe vs. America thing, more like American conservatives vs. everyone else. You'll find *plenty* of U.S. Americans who agree with me on this specific issue, even on this site, and even on Twitter itself.
It's tough when we are constantly under attack from bozos regurgitating left wing dogma and being seen as only the worst aspects of that political belief system.
Eh, conservatives have their significant quota of blame for the current state of things, and definitely need to introspect a little if we truly want to address this issue and its causes. Things like Jan 6th, weaponizing the SCOTUS towards becoming a political organ used to enforce Republican identity politics (such as, most notably, repealing Roe), obstructionism, "grab them by the p*ssy", wild yet never proven (in court) conspiracies and even accusations of electoral fraud certainly don't help.
Besides, the fact that Democrats are currently led by an old school centrist, as opposed to an equally radical leader speaks volume on which is the party actually open to compromise, and which is not. The GOP may or may have not learned this lesson with the recent midterm fiasco, we'll see who will be the candidates next round.
That's not my experience at all, and I challenge you to take a more skeptical approach and see how these activists turn on you. I will say that older transgender identifying people seem much more open minded and compassionate, but there are inflexible, indoctrinated zealots who seem to make their specific issues very important and they are not at all open minded or compassionate on this issue if you choose to question some things or disagree with others.
Okay, but are we speaking of experiences, however, or the movement? I've never denied the existence of zealots, and as I said I oppose them as much as you do; I'm disputing on the fact that the movement exists to demand better integration of transgender population in society, and not primarily to be a platform for the zealots.
Similarly, and by applying the very same principle, should we demand the complete dissolution of the GOP as a whole, because of its own zealots involved with the failed coup, and because my own personal experience with Republicans involves mostly interacting with subjects that act at best apologetically, and at worst sympathetically, towards said insurrectionists?
why is it so hard to honor MY choice of how I wish to be identified, but you have no issues how transgenders or other races choose to identify, and I would speculate you honor those choices without question. Why must my choice be argued against? If it truly is no big deal, why are you still arguing this point? I identify as a man or male, don't call me cis gendered. Why is this so hard to respect?
In fact I haven't used any label on you, respecting your choice, you may want to re-read that paragraph. I've merely pointed out that "cis-gender" is just another way to write "not-transexual", except by using a less common old latin prefix instead of "non-" or "a-".
That doesn't constitute "using a label against anyone", that simply explains why it isn't analogous to a pronoun.
I wasn't even born in the 1970s or let alone the Roman age, so unless I'm capable of time travel I couldn't have come with any of these definitions myself.
The real world CLEARLY is showing that these rates are garbage and not at all relevant
Hmm no, it's not. As I said my real world experience with healthcare is dramatically different now than it was between Feb 2020 and early 2021, before vaccines were available and mass distributed. Starting from the fact I may get visited inside the hospital and not in a tent on the parking lot outside (if lucky) or postponed indefinitely (if not). The friends I have who work in healthcare are no longer overwhelmed with 15+ hours shifts, and a constant flow of inpatients requiring an urgent transfer to intensive care, and then a ~50% of those to the morgue. I no longer hear from friends or relatives that their parents, friends, spouses or grandparents are suffocating in their own homes, waiting for an ambulance that never comes to pick them up.
A lot of people have been lucky to see the first wave of COVID only through the lens of the news, and have this "privilege" of speculating about its existence or severity, lacking an reference baseline situation for comparisons. Unfortunately it's not the case for everyone, especially for those of us that were locked down for first.
Hey, maybe its the variants and they are solely responsible here, but nobody with a lick of common sense believes the Covid 19 vaccines prevent the spread of Covid.
That was never the tested endpoint of vaccines in fact, it was to mitigate/fix the situation described above. Remember that the vaccine effectiveness acceptability criterium, before the first vaccines reached distribution, was fixated at 50% and for
symptomatic disease. Which means, if it turned 99% of the recipients into asymptomatic spreaders on exposure, it would've still passed the requirement. This expectation was far below the efficacy what we've seen in the real world. Even now with Omicron, vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease is ~60%.
The fact that at first they seemed effective also towards hampering transmission, with the variants that were circulating at the time, was picked up by political and health regulators as one other further reason to indicate the general population to take their shot. I honestly see no problem with this. Similarly, if a company designs something that actually turn out better than the original design, the final product gets marketed taking into account the bonuses. The message was never "it's only worth vaccinating if and only if by doing so you're no longer capable of transmitting", the message was "avoid yourself a trip to hell, avoid being a burden to hospitals, you'll have a significantly smaller chance to infect others and may significantly contribute to the end of this emergency".
Restriction on the unvaccinated were put with the purpose of averting another healthcare-system collapse, not to prevent the spread; similarly to how you get fined if you wear without the proverbial seatbelt because, if everybody did, hospitals would be full of people injured in minor crashes - and not as a method to eliminate crashes. If vaccines were ineffective against transmission from the beginning, but still as effective against hospitalization as they are, arguably restrictions and criticism on the anti-vaxxers would've most likely been the same. I'll expand more on this in the next paragraphs.
You ever notice how the mainstream always has studies available at the ready that purport to show what they are already promoting?
Perhaps because the studies come first, and then "mainstream" report on them? I don't really care about what the press has to say honestly, I generally prefer getting my information straight out of the papers, especially so long as everything keeps getting published in open access. As I stated the press is itself a constellation of for-profit corporations (with a natural pro-capitalist bias due to their own nature), and hence the less layers of businesses I have to go through, the better.
...or could it be that they design and fund studies that "prove" what they are already promoting? If you were a research scientist you probably wouldn't get a lot of funding questioning the dogma around the Covid 19 vaccines, but if you were interested in "proving" they were effective, it's likely your study has a better chance of being approved.
This could be a valid point. *Could*, if only the GOP and analogous parties worldwide didn't lose so much face by trying to appease an increasingly smaller vaccine-skeptical base, and weren't so desperate to find and fund with every mean possible any such study, no matter how small, that could hopefully restore some of their credibility on the whole matter. Just like they did with the Yan hot garbage to try to prove an artificial origin, except it was so badly written it would've had a problem passing even for something coming out of a high school. No, I don't really think any such study would have a funding problem, honestly, all the opposite.
I'm glad you found the research that comforts you and encourages your beliefs.
I don't think the point I've made before about "beliefs" was understood. You're free to link here any counter evidence you may find, concluding that vaccines had a negligible impact on the evolution of the pandemic, if you want to challenge this.
The piece that is missing from your analogy is the one that says that the seatbelt hasn't been tested properly. [...]
And also here you would have a point if only the analogy wasn't missing another piece: unlike crashes, the alternative here (i.e. totally unprotected exposure) isn't well understood either, and for what we know from the closest resembling thing humanity has known so far (i.e. SARS-1; people with lingering complication and partially or totally debilitated even decades after "recovery"), there's little room for doubting it's going to be anywhere less risky than a fast-tracked vaccine that however passed its rounds of clinical trials.
In an ideal world, you'd have the privilege to take neither. In this world, either you get exposed to the real pathogen, and hope the Russian roulette with ~1/25 rounds plays in your favor, or you take the vaccine, still get exposed to the pathogen soon or later, and and again hope that the other Russian roulette with 1 round loaded out of several thousands plays in your favor. Unless you're rich enough to afford buying your own private island and strand yourself there for the next 5-10 years until the whole situation gets figured out better, all the options you have involve some non-negligible level of risk. That's the bitter inconvenient truth that everyone seems to have a problem accepting.
it still would have spread.
Impossible to know, as I said this ship has now long sailed. You may only speculate at most. All the data available point out that pre-Delta variants would get sufficiently hampered in terms of transmission by the vaccines available at the time, that it could've been eradicated, at least in our countries.
It was spread just as effectively by those that got vaccinated and boosted.
This is a battle against arithmetic. Whether transmission stops or not depends solely on three numbers: vaccine effectiveness against infection, vaccine uptake, reproduction rate. A 70% vaccinated population was sufficient to starve the virus out of hosts before Delta appeared.
Starving the virus of hosts is, as previously mentioned, exactly how the sister "SARS-1" pandemic ended in the early 2000s, so definitely not something unheard of or even less so unprecedented.
The reproduction rate with Omicron (even taking for good the lowest estimate) is so elevated that we'd need the whole population to take a hypothetical nigh 100%-effective vaccine to eradicate it now. Hence, that ship has now sailed.
Antivaxxers only have blame if they themselves didn't get the vaccine and specifically spread it to someone vulnerable or they themselves got it.
Antivaxxers' primary faults are essentially two:
1) spreading misinformation that led a lot of gullible/uninformed/uncertain/scared people to die unnecessarily and/or join their ranks, and
2) essentially leading a denial-of-service attack on healthcare facilities, oftentimes immolating themselves while doing so, causing an unnecessary extension of emergency measures (to keep the mostly-unvaxxed patient flow manageable), and burdening the taxpayers to pay for their otherwise shorter or even unnecessary stays and treatments.
These two reason alone were, if you ask me, sufficient ground to enact a mandate, no different than what was enacted at the time for eradicating smallpox and polio. However, in the name of compromising with people who themselves wouldn't be open to any compromise in the first place (throwing a fit even for wearing a surgical mask prior entering a shop), no mandate was ever enforced.
So just to be clear, they emigrated well before Mussolini and the fascist regimes.
Yes, not saying you're representational of those, just saying they exist and aren't few.
hijacked by the 2 party system
I'm no fan of the FPTP/EC system that leads to such a duopoly, on the other hand I know firsthand the weaknesses of a parliamentary system. So long as the party which wins even by a 0.1% margin wins all, it's inevitable for two super-parties to form. And eventually, if the possible choices are ultimately two, everything becomes a binary matter as a consequences.
It's up to Americans to vote more moderate leaders in the primaries if they want to compromise with their opposition. As previously stated, one party is led by a centrist, the other is still acting like the platform for any and every contrarian far-right extremist in the country, de facto keeping the same trajectory taken in 2016. As an outsider, compromising doesn't seem easy at all to me, or even possible, in such a scenario.
