Oh, it’s so much worse than that. They are rational actors. Terrifyingly rational actors.

Once you get past a certain amount of wealth, the only purpose of money is status, prestige, and power. Imagine you gave Elon Musk two choices, two different worlds he could live in:

1. A world where he had 200 billion and everyone else had 10 million.

2. A world where had 100 billion and everyone else had 100,000.

He would choose the first option. Why? Because status. In a world where everyone was independently wealthy, he wouldn’t have people fawning over him all the time. Few people would willingly work for him, as they already had all of their their needs met. In order to really enjoy his billions, he needs millions of poor desperate people he can exploit for labor and adoration.

Milton figured this out in Paradise Lost way back in the 17th century.

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

I don’t really see why Iran is any worse than Israel, other than Iran has brown people living in it. Once you cut past all the crap and bad faith, ultimately we judge Iran worse than Israel because of skin color.

Both are nominal but deeply flawed democracies. Both hold large numbers of political dissidents on bogus charges as a matter of course. Both are theocracies that make their religion a core component of their governmental structure. Both engage in large scale acts of mass state-sponsored terrorism. Both have or seek to have a nuclear arsenal.

The only real difference I can see is that Iran hasn’t invaded anyone in the whole modern history of the country. The Iranian government is a bunch of peace-and-love hippies compared to the Israelis.

I always liked the “one soul” theory. The concept is toyed with in the short story The Egg.

Basically reincarnation is real. Except if a soul can jump through space between lives, there’s no reason it can’t also jump through time. Space and time are one and the same.

Imagine if when you die, you wake up being born in another life. But that life could be anywhere in the past, present or future. Your consciousness doesn’t move linearly forward through time in a series of lifetimes arranged in a line. It bounces all over the place. 21st century US one lifetime, 8300 BC Peru the next, 12000 AD Alpha Centauri after that. And the whole chain of consciousness is a closed loop. Ultimately, there is just one soul, just one consciousness, bouncing back and forth across all of the history of creation. And when the soul’s path is complete, when it has lived every life there is to live? It loops back on itself.

You are a being of this universe. You are the consciousness of this universe. As am I. You and I are literally the same mind, separated perhaps by billions of lifetimes. Or perhaps I will live your life next, or you mine. Eternal life is real, but contained entirely within our finite universe. An endless loop of awareness echoing throughout all of creation. And we need to be kind to one another, as when I hurt you, I am literally hurting myself.

I don’t really think it’s something I personally believe, but it is a really cool concept that I love.

This kind of thing happens even if you don’t assume time repeats. As far as we can measure, the universe is spacially infinite. Finite age, infinite spacial extent. If you ever hear someone talk about the diameter of the universe, they’re talking about the diameter of the observable universe - the part of the universe close enough for its light to actually reach us. But as far as we can measure (based on measurements of large scale spacial curvature), the universe is truly, literally infinite. It’s possible it curves back on itself with a radius much larger than the diameter of the visible universe. But if it truly is infinite, infinities make some very weird things possible.

For example, a diameter the size of the observable universe has a finite number of states. There are only so many atoms and so many ways to arrange those atoms. This number is unfathomably large, but it’s not infinite. But in an infinite universe, on a large enough distance, everything repeats. It doesn’t repeat in a regular pattern, but it does repeat. So get in a space ship and fly off into space. If you could go far enough, eventually you would run into an exact duplicate of yourself, with all the memories and life experiences you have - an atom-for-atom copy of yourself. Travel far enough and you’ll encounter a duplicate of our entire observable universe. And worse still, if the universe truly is infinite, there must be an infinite number of such copies.

I’m not talking about alternate realities or parallel universes here. I’m not talking about getting in a time machine and visiting an alternate timeline. I’m not talking about the quantum many worlds theory. I’m talking about the very space you inhabit, this universe. If you go out in a space ship and could travel arbitrarily far, it would eventually seem like you had come right back home, even though you’re quintillions of light years from where you were born.

Infinity is a terrifying thing.

You’re substituting “statistically impossible” for “emotionally impossible.”

Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024. They would have lost in 2020 if it weren’t for covid.

Sure. History has proven that civil rights laws that are very specific and explicit are much more resilient to legal challenge than broad ones. They probably should have been a hell of a lot more specific in the Reconstruction amendments.

Sex discrimination is already fairly generic. The only way to get more generic is the Equal Protection Clause, and that’s proven completely toothless. Generally the less specific a protection is, the less real impact it has.

Exactly. That’s how sacrifice worked. You burned shit to give it to the gods. These guys just gave Baal a really nice statue of Satan to put in his living room.

I cannot imagine what on Earth they’re thinking.

I can. They’re deathly afraid of another 2024. In 2024, they were reminded that you can’t take your base for granted. Kamala tried to appeal to moderate Republicans and through a lot of progressives under the bus. They’re afraid of a repeat.

And a lot of progressives are at risk of severe demoralization if Democrats backpedal on trans rights. First, there’s trans people themselves, who are about 1% of the population. But then you have supportive family and allies. And crucially, trans people are vastly overrepresented among Democratic party volunteers and nonprofit groups. Trans people often can’t help but be involved in politics, as their existence is a political issue. If Democrats throw trans folks under the bus, they’re at real risk of losing some of their most passionate and dedicated volunteers and donors.

This action is meant to speak to the progressive base. It says, “we hear you. We see you. We are not abandoning you to the wolves.”

Does it have any hope of passing now? No. Is it a performance? Quite possibly. But then again, all of politics is a performance.

Trans people were among the first victims of the Nazis. And here you are, continuing their legacy.

Over specificity in establishing rights and protections is how we end to with trans people being denied rights and how we have to argue semantics about who is actually protected by the law.

This isn’t true. It’s the vague generic protections that are easy for courts to warp. Discrimination against trans people is a plain violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause and is a form of illegal sex discrimination. Yet courts have found ways around those. You need to explicitly ban discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.

We can’t rely on generic civil rights laws. We already tried that with the Equal Protection Clause, which provides a blanket ban on all forms of government discrimination. We already tried what you propose. In practice, when you want to protect civil rights, you have to ban specific categories of discrimination. Generic bans are toothless.

General civil blanket rights protections don’t work. We already have laws against sex discrimination. By any objective measure, discriminating against trans people is sex discrimination. It is literally sex discrimination to ban hormone treatments for minors. Imagine a doctor that will prescribe a cis girl E is she has low E levels, but she won’t prescribe a trans girl E because of her perceived or actual sex. That is literally sex discrimination. Yet the courts are letting laws against trans medical care stand.

What is needed is explicit legal protections for gender identity and gender expression. These laws protect both cis and trans people from being discriminated against based on these factors. But you can’t just rely on generic sex-discrimination provisions, as conservative courts have found absurd interpretations of the law to find that plain sex discrimination is anything but. You need to give the slimy bastards zero wiggle room.

Or for another example:

Don’t make the rule that “you can’t deny someone food stamps due to their trans identity”; say people can’t be denied food stamps.

This statement is nonsensical. What do you mean, “people can’t be denied food stamps.” Of course people can be denied food stamps! Bill Gates doesn’t need to qualify for food stamps. When you want to ban a form of discrimination, you have to specifically define what form of discrimination is banned. You cannot just pass a blanket law that says, “don’t discriminate against anyone for any reason,” as there are countless valid reasons to discriminate against people. It’s just not valid to discriminate against people based on innate traits. If I’m a restaurant owner, it’s perfectly fine to throw someone out if they’re rude or a belligerent asshole. I’m discriminating against assholes.

You just can’t rely on vague legal language, as courts will always find a way to rule that marginalized groups for some reason don’t qualify under the generic protections. This is why we had to pass laws specifically banning race, gender, and religious discrimination. More generic protections had already failed. After all, the highest law of the land, the Constitution, already has the Equal Protection Clause, and minority groups have found its protection to be incredibly weak.

“[Nor shall any State] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

According to the plain text of the Constitution, the Civil Rights, the Women’s Rights, and the Queer Rights movements should have been completely unnecessary. After all, Jim Crow laws plainly violated this provision. Yet because the language was weak and nonspecific, it was easy for courts to find that black people could be denied the right to vote.

As far as appealing to the manosphere? You’re trying to appeal to a carnival of liars and con men. The objective reality of your actions has little bearing on who they choose to target for their five minutes of hate.

Why would the military be a representative sample? Maybe when we had the draft, sure. But even then their were conscientious objectors, and of course women weren’t drafted. And plenty of people voluntarily enlisted even in the Vietnam era.

Is it not reasonable to expect that those with high empathy levels would be less likely to voluntarily enlist? Knowing nothing else, I would expect the military to select for those with low empathy levels. It’s an obviously useful ability if your job is to kill other human beings. And you’re supposed to carry out orders without any consideration for the consequences of those orders or who they hurt. That sounds like an extremely low-empathy environment.

You dumbass, this is happening in every country on Earth.

The birth rate will recover when children can play games and run free among the ancient grass-covered ruins of abandoned suburbia.

Are you an illegal person? Has your existence been declared illegal yet?

Sorry. Open source offends corporate interests and is therefore pornographic. You’re a pornographer.