Hot, Bad & Unpopular Takes

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I like David Brooks.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

TexArkana wins the thread.  Congrats.

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It definitely seems like way back in the day unpopular/bad opinions used to be a lot more tolerated on this forum without people freaking out over them.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I have a lot of unpopular opinions clearly.  A lot of them stem from my belief that communicating successfully language is inherently difficult, and so it makes sense to have a bias towards the most charitable interpretation of a remark, since you almost always approach a text or speech with a bias towards what it is going to say whether or not you recognize it.

Along with this, most things that get called "dog whistles" are nothing of the kind. Some term may have a racial connotation, but that is typically because the term has accrued that connotation while still retaining its original meaning, not because the term is used by a certain group of people to secretly say how racist they are. A person who complains about "rootless cosmopolitans" may or may not be an anti-Semite as a part of that, but unless they are in the propoganda business, chances are they wouldn't like someone with the characteristics of a rootless cosmopolitan whether or not the person is Jewish. Also the idea that Lee Atwater revealed some esoteric truth that "tax cuts" and similar platform positions are really all about racism is a preposterous misinterpretation of what he was saying in that infamous interview.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Don't abuse these people's cases to defend #IRONSTACHE being a deadbeat who only paid child support to quiet things down before a house campaign. Many (like 99% women) people desperately need child support to support their child and themselves(especially women, who are systemically pushed from high paying jobs that give the ability to be financially independant), especially in cases of domestic abuse(we really don't want abusers to be able to keep their victims hostage because they're the only breadwinner). Repealing child support would cause devastating consequences that would far outweigh the benefits of the much rarer problems it imposes. We didn't legalize rape because of lynchings. Why should this be any different?

Well one difference is it's usually pretty easy for a person in financial difficulty to not rape someone.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

IMO the biggest problem with child support is that there seems to be no opt-out for it at all.  I don't think any person should be subject to 18 years hard labor against their will, physical or financial, male or female.  That precisely is why I'm pro-choice.

But, I also believe that childbearing should be universally discouraged.  That's what puts me at odds with most people, I think.

if you sign your rights away don't you not have to pay child support anymore?

I think that's fair, if you want to be a part of the child's life then you should pay, but otherwise just sign your rights away then you don't have to pay it.

That is putting the incentives precisely backwards from where they should be.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

IMO the biggest problem with child support is that there seems to be no opt-out for it at all.  I don't think any person should be subject to 18 years hard labor against their will, physical or financial, male or female.  That precisely is why I'm pro-choice.

But, I also believe that childbearing should be universally discouraged.  That's what puts me at odds with most people, I think.

if you sign your rights away don't you not have to pay child support anymore?

I think that's fair, if you want to be a part of the child's life then you should pay, but otherwise just sign your rights away then you don't have to pay it.

That is putting the incentives precisely backwards from where they should be.

ummm. i don't understand. so you're saying that a parent should still have visitation rights with their child even if they are contributing absolutely nothing to the child's life?

Being a part of a child's life is a contribution in itself. They should be contributing financially as well, but it is a lot better than nothing, and certainly not something that should be discouraged by making it cost money.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

if the speed limit is 65 or more mph, or inappropriately high for the conditions, it's ok to drive slower than that in the left lane.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I feel like renaming this thread. What do y'all think I should rename it as?

Bad/Unpopular Opinions

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Neither fascism nor communism killed anyone. Fascists and communists did.

I don't see how that's an unpopular opinion. It's undeniably true.

Everyone always blames the ideology and not the ideologues.

I think if your ideology literally requires killing people for it to be implement, it kind of makes sense to give it at least some of the blame.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Antz is better than A Bug's Life

wow.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Mike Pence is a kind and gentle man who loves the gays.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Jordan Peterson is wrong sometimes but is generally a good psychologist.

This is the dude that actively refused to respect his trans students pronouns because "free speech".

Note that this refusal is within contexts of debates about the issue itself and is otherwise hypothetical.  No one claimed he called them the wrong thing.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Jordan Peterson is wrong sometimes but is generally a good psychologist.

This is the dude that actively refused to respect his trans students pronouns because "free speech".

Note that this refusal is within contexts of debates about the issue itself and is otherwise hypothetical.  No one claimed he called them the wrong thing.

So he swore he wouldn't respect any trans students but its okay because...

He doesn't have any trans students. Try applying this logic to the N word or something.

You mean if someone wanted to be called the N word?    No, I'd refuse.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The most recent Republican president who was not a racist was Dwight D Eisenhower.

What about pre-Obama for Democrats?  And you really think that Eisenhower - a man born in Texas in 1890 - was a less racist human than Gerald Ford or George W. Bush?  Like, honestly?  LOL.

It's not like I'd call Ike a racist, but he was rather lukewarm about pursuing the civil rights until the courts took a major step on this.

He was pretty insistent on making sure the military was fully integrated.   But he recognized school integration and wider social integration in the South was going to be more divisive and so he wanted to go gradually to avoid national conflict over the issue.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I remember reading somewhere that Nixon usually opposed abortion in almost every case; but then he went in the entirely opposite direction when the parents were not of the same racial group, instead wanting to force an abortion to happen in these cases.

Not that he wanted to force them but he said it might be "necessary" in those cases, saying that and rape were exceptions to his general opposition.   These were from tapes that were released in the past few years so he didn't ever clarify what his thinking was on the issue.   

Nixon was very complex character, and like LBJ had some ugly racial prejudices but nonetheless did a great deal for the cause of civil rights, integration and trying to bring blacks out of poverty.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Westboro Baptist Church is a false flag operation.

Please elaborate?

Fred Phelps did a lot of civil rights activism back in the 1960's. Because of that and his church's behaviour, there is a conspiracy theory that he is a liberal in deep cover trying to make the orthodox Christian position look bad.

I think that severely underestimates the idiosyncratic combinations of belief that are possible within American religious groups.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The only "logic" that can really be used to argue that child support is "good" policy is that it is worthwhile to prevent even an extremely minuscule amount of abortions is worth an enormous level of damage to the social fabric of individual rights and autonomy.

People should not be forced to take parental responsibility roles if they do not want to, which is a viewpoint basically any progressive should be able to agree to.

Child support is something that can suddenly and drastically ruin people lives, and is a cause of countless suicides.

Isn't "social fabric of autonomy" a contradiction in terms? 

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

There is nothing dangerous or unhealthy about GMO foods.

Settled science doesn't really fit here IMO.

"Settled science" is an oxymoron.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

You aren't able to explore the sources of social conflict in any deep way if you aren't willing to consider things that might be construed as "victim blaming."

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

There is no such thing as "Generation X". "Gen Xers loved Reagan" is a common political trope, but a 40-year old today was born in 1978 and has at best vague memories of Reagan. I prefer to think of the older half of them (where that trope originates) as a sort of extension of Baby Boomers, and the younger half as a sort of pre-Millennials. Also younger Gen Xers are almost as liberal as Millennials (which is not surprising as they were in their 20s during the second Bush term.)

Lots of people have significant memories of national and world events that occurred before they were 10 years old.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The PC Left focuses their cultural representation activism on opposing the most innocuous, harmless stereotypes and appropriations because they enjoy the idea of the bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat feeling threatened by minorities.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

The idea that "working class" and "middle class" are mutually exclusive requires some rather ridiculous definitions of those terms.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

A "Sick burn" is just an "Ackchyually" adapted to a highly combative ecosystem.