tikitaki

Imagine you're Farmer Bob in a temperate region great for growing apples and I'm Farmer Fred in a tropical area ideal for bananas. We each like bananas and apples, so tried growing both fruits, each of us harvesting 12 of our specialty and 6 of the other, making a total output of 36 fruits.

But then, we learned about the power of trade. We focused on what our lands did best: I harvested 24 bananas, you 24 apples. We swapped half our produce, and like magic - We both had 12 bananas and 12 apples each, totaling 48 fruits, a 25% increase just from trade.

But what if we stopped trading due to trust issues? We'd revert to the less efficient system, losing out on the additional produce.

Now, think of this on a global scale. When countries specialize and trade, we all gain. But as governments decouple from global trade, they're choosing to lose these benefits, making economies less efficient. It's a dangerous path where everyone ends up poorer.

And for our governments to deliberately choose a path that makes us all poorer - that means there's an unchecked growing tension. It's almost palpable. We're already living through a Gilded Age nearly a century after the last one... what happened after the Gilded Age?

Call me a doomer but this is alarming news, even if understandable from a national security perspective

it's good in the short term but realistically this news is a canary in the coal mine moment

we are decoupling our economies from the global system - increasing the chances for cold and/or hot war

at least they're honest about it

i'd imagine they have the same ability here in the states they're just gonna advertise the fact

instead of making an effort to change our way of life.

the unfortunate reality is the only way to significantly change carbon emissions in a fast enough time period would essentially mean throwing all of humanity back a couple of centuries in tech and standard of living

you try being a politician who advocates for this. you're not gonna get elected

even worse, convince all the 3rd world countries who are currently developing trying to get their people out of poverty. the chinese have finally gotten the taste for a little bit of meat with their dinner. of course that comes at the cost of mountains of coal being burned.

you tell those hundreds of millions of people that they need to go back to the farms and eat rice for the climate - meanwhile we got our chance to burn as much coal as we wanted to last century.

the reality is that we won't be able to stop climate change. the reality is that we're going to have to learn to live with it. and we will. climate change will not destroy us. it will destroy many species, will destroy many habitable zones. but we will survive.

i'm more worried about nuclear war & AI - which i think has a much more acute danger

zizek talks about this a lot. who are trump's most loyal fans? sure, there are the harvard educated elitists who like that he lowers taxes on the rich and the business magnates and whatnot. but the bulk of it in terms of absolute numbers is the redneck poor people

why do they support trump? because their jobs were lost to outsourcing, their wages aren't going up so housing is more expensive, their towns are slowly rotting away. they see these things and feel a (in my opinion, justified) anger towards the establishment.

someone like Trump and the GOP in general comes around, blames the gays and immigrants and tells them they will fight for them. we all know it's a lie and that they are voting against their interests - but the MAGA propaganda has gotten to them first

these same triggers (stagnant wages, anger towards the establishment/elites, erosion of infrastructure, inaccessible healthcare) also causes people to become leftists

these people could have easily flipped one way or the other and the only different is propaganda. we need to reach out to these people and convince them that the left has viable solutions for their problems. if you're interested, i can find a zizek bit where he talks about this but I've seen it myself talking to a lot of trump-supporting conservatives.

some of them are racist bigots and whatnot, but others are just really ignorant old folk who genuinely want the best for most people and have been misled by propaganda

yes, of course. it's indicative of that type of worldview and it's demeaning

however the key important part is that it isn't hate speech. being pro-hate speech and using hate speech are two different things

as much as i hate trump we should hate the sin and not the sinner

lots of trump supporters could easily be leftists

i think it's dangerous to be too broad with this definition

harmful in my mind is saying explicitly racist, homophobic, promoting violent, etc type of stuff

i think freedom of expression is something we should not give up easily. in actually harmful speech, i think the pros outweigh the cons. but him saying the word "triggered" is not harmful

was in the article i linked

between 2009 and 2019, children being referred for transitioning treatment in the United Kingdom increased 1,000% among biological males and 4,400% among biological females.

i guess it's too much to expect people to read things

Also, do you really think that more people identify as trans because it’s a „fad“ or maybe it’s because your can finally openly talk about it

i think it's both. i don't know at what ratio, but kids really do follow fads. one kid kills themselves at a school and it raises the chances for all of them to do so. ideas are contagious. a kid that may just be going through the regular teenage angst period searching for an identity might latch onto the trans label to explain their feelings when really it's just a normal teenage thing to go through identity issues

again, i'm not trying to say kids shouldn't transition. i view transitioning as healthcare so to block kids off from it is absurd. but i think we also need to be careful and talk about the elephant in the room - that the rate of trans kids increasing so dramatically points to some issues with the ways we are doing it. when something jumps up so dramatically we should be asking questions

we aren't seeing a 4000% increase in kids becoming gymnasts

it's a poignant social topic. instead of attacking my credibility, aiming to represent me as biased, you should try to attack my argument

having said that, i support kids transitioning. i'm more upset about the "wrongthink" mentality where someone can't even share their opinion without getting pounced on. he isn't sharing hate speech he's just talking

You're not their doctor, they arent your patients, what business is it of yours?

ok, so if you're not a doctor you can have no opinion on healthcare now? ridiculous statement. i think healthcare should be free. i don't work in healthcare or health insurance. so am i just supposed to shut the fuck up and know my place?

no, I have my opinion and I'm going to share it and @JasSmith has his opinion and he's going to share it. that's the whole point of having discussion boards. the last thing i want is this place to become an echo chamber

i think kids should be able to transition. but it's also not so simple a conversation when you're making permanent changes to teenage kids - https://nypost.com/2022/06/18/detransitioned-teens-explain-why-they-regret-changing-genders/

kids are fickle creatures and fads catch on - all of a sudden we see a dramatic rise in kids wanting to transition - like 4400% increase in girls wanting to transition to boys. is it because we are now more accepting as a society or is it social contagion? probably both and it's a serious topic we need to address if we actually do want the best for the kids. we need to keep ideology out of healthcare and make sure each individual kid is taken care of with whatever is best for them - transitioning is not always the best option. but sometimes it is.