"but it's far more likely that those who actually get off their ass and use a sauna are not the kind of lazy obese people that die of heart and lung diseases due to an inactive lifestyle."
How is using a sauna an active person only thing? Your assumption seems obsurd to me. To use one all you literally have to do is sit down for an extended period.
"The US was the strongest defender of capitalism. Much of Europe was leaning towards socialist policies"
We have socialist policies in this country right here and now. Sorry but there has never been any danger of the West going communist on its own let alone Western Europeans who invented the concept of capitalism and are very capitalistic to this day. The only threat communism posed to the West was militaristic.
"There is no minority "right" for 99.9% of the people to respect the delusions of 0.1% of the people."
And once upon a time there were no rights allowed at all for the small minority that was black slaves either, What's your point?
Furthermore, they really aren't delusions if 51% of Americans believe that they should exist.
"I gave you a link for a real-world case. It was a locker room, not a public rest room."
Cool, so you spend your time looking at people's junk in changing rooms?
Honestly, I've never understood the objection to having a transgender person in the some changing room as the sex they identify as. Odds are you're not so attractive that anyone wants to look at you naked and if you are then you are way more likely to have a run-of-the-mill gay person taking a peak at you then a transgender person as they are generally interested in the opposite gender from what they identify as.
You're ignoring that the Republicans haven't even tried to use their majority in all areas to pass meaningful legistlation in regards to illegal immigration without that stupid wall attached.
Honestly, after the last election I was thinking "well at least we'll see the deficit cut and have something meaningful done about illegal immigration" which are two big reasons I'm an independent and not a Democrat. Now our defficit is significantly worse and all of the Republican attempts at immigration are tied to that albatross of a wall.
"Last century the rest of the world was moving towards communism..."
No it wasn't. Some portions certainly were but the entirety of the West never seriously entertained communism and neither did most third world countries.
"Transgender "rights" are for something like 0.1% of the population, of which 99.9% of society are required to reprogram themselves and respect the delusions of an extremely tiny minority."
One of the founding philosophies of this country was the need to protect minority rights.
"of which 99.9% of society are required to reprogram themselves and respect the delusions of an extremely tiny minority. "
Quite a bit of our population had to "reprogram" after slavery ended and the civil rights movement and we all agree we came out the better for it now. Maybe that's just the reprogramming talking though. What do you think?
Furthermore, it wouldn't be 99.9% requiring reprogramming, it would only be whatever percentage of people get enraged by some one taking a dump in a public rest room that matches the sex they identify with rather then the one they were born. Right now it looks like that is slightly less than half the country ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/2... )
"Yes, you are hard-left if you think that a biological male that "identifies" as a woman has a right to hang out with biological women with his male genitalia hanging [tmj4.com] out."
And you've never used a public rest room if you think that's what goes on in them. You make it sound like a porn shoot in one of those things. In all my time on this earth I've never seen a mans dick in a public rest room and we men use urinals. Lady's have all their sensitive business conducted in stalls.
"How is that going to happen when Democrats opposed [politico.com] an amnesty grant for "Dreamers" in exchange for an immigration overhaul? Do you think they're ever going to accept nationally mandated e-verify? Democrat states have become "sanctuary" states. Democrats have become the party of illegal immigrants."
Republicans control both houses of congress and the presidency. If the Democrats can pass the Affordable Care act under such conditions then Republicans should be able to do something infinitely less complex like make using an alreadying existing e-verify system manditory.
Also, much of the Democratic opposition came from wall funding but again, that shouldn't matter right now.
"It was only 25 billion for the wall, along with an end to chain migration, and a focus on merit-based immigration. What were the Democrats opposed to?"
For starters, there are a lot of independent estimates that are much higher for the wall, plus there is the yearly maintenance. Even if 25 billion is correct though, that's a hell of a lot for something unlikely to work when there are far cheaper solutions that likely will (as I have already brought up) After that, it doesnt matter what the Democrats want or don't want on other issues because, as I state above, the Republicans shouldn't need Democrat help under current conditions.
Honestly I think you're under the old Republican mindset from under Obama where Republicans would never hold themselves accountable for our governance which they had quite a bit of control of "cause Obama". The problem with that mindset is that Obama is gone now and Republicans control all of our government, including now the supreme court with this latest nomination and yet they can't do anything meaningful like pass successful legislation on one of their most significant planks.
Republicans blaming Democrats for our bad governance right now just highlights Republican lack of will to do something or their general incompetence
Is it really such a stretch of the imagination for you that a country that looks to see their favored US presidential candidate elected through social media influence and hacking for dirt wouldn't be happy about lax voting security?
"The Dems have moved hard-left as they've won issue after issue."
You gave me a chuckle there.
The only realistic way to determine how far out of wack a given ideology is, is to compare it to others so as to be able to put it on a spectrum. Relative to other first world countries our Democrats are mild conservatives when it comes to economics. On social issues (which is what you seem to have a hard on for here) they are very much in line with mainstream political views throughout the first world which means they are not "hard" anything.
"If Democrats were really serious about immigration, they'd work with Trump and bring a sane immigration policy that put American interests first."
If Republicans were really serious about illegal immigration they'd propose solutions to illegal immigration that would actually stand a chance at working well like making the already existing e-verify system mandatory for employers in this country. No jobs for illegal immigrants means no illegal immigrants, it's incredibly simple.
But no, stupid ideas like a massively expensive wall that will do nothing to change the simple supply and demand nature of illegal immigration and the labor they provide and thus do very little to solve the problem is what's popular right now among Republicans.
The interesting part for me is pondering why Republican politicians talk tough but won't propose plans that will actually have an impact on illegal immigration. The only motive I can see is that our food comes overwhelmingly from Red states and Red regions of Blue states and the food industry probably profits the most from illegal immigrant labor in this country. My best guess is that Republican politicians don't want to do anything to upset big Ag and stop the money from flowing from them.
That last part I will freely admit is pure speculation on my part but the fact that the Republican party is more concerned about making noise about illegal immigration than they are about solving it is easily observed.
What you say makes complete sense but sadly there is a fairly large body of Americans who believe that the government doing anything is always bad. That coupled with big telecom money makes change almost impossible some places.
Thanks for that genius. The point is that meat is not commonly eaten by third world poor because it's expensive so they are either vegetarians or mostly so because of cost. In other words, it is not a philosophical preference that drives many people to not eat meat, it's that meat is expensive and therefor being a vegetarian is not a "luxury" as you stated above.
This really should be common sense for anyone who buys their own groceries and cooks. For any given meal the most expensive thing on a meat eaters plate is usually the meat.
" Even though I'm not recommending to eat 10kg of meat per day, humans have evolved to consume some meat/fish and evolved to eat it because it has a much higher energy density than plants so you can eat less of it and require less energy to consume it."
This all has nothing to do with whether being a vegetarian is a luxury or not.
Have you seen pricing on grass fed beef? Most of our live stock is not grazed because that's too expensive in terms of land use. It's much cheaper to feed them corn and soy (people food) which is why we do exactly that.
Those high prices are thanks to the region's stupid growth planning. If prices are so high, where is all of the new construction? At those prices San Francisco and the Valley south of there should be on a building spree of new high-rise construction which would make tons of money for developers and push up housing supply which would lower prices for everyone. This isn't being allowed to happen by local government and now those people selling us our food live in poverty at $20 an hour.
The Bay Area's housing price problem is a simple problem of supply being kept artificially low in the face of huge demand. This has been going on long enough that it looks like it is finally effecting the region's economy.
Domesticated animals have been selectively bred since they were domesticated animals as that's how we got domesticated animals. These animals don't live in the wild naturally.
"...kept their entire lives in sheds in cages too small to turn around in, fed with hormones to make them grow faster and pumped with antibiotics to stop them getting sick in the cramped conditions."
Which is why it's great we have options in our grocery stores for animals that have not been raised as such.
"The treatment of animals as industrial commodities is offensive to many people."
Sadly the adoption rate for the above referenced ethically raised animal products isnt very high as indicated by what most grocery stores carry which means your "many" isn't very many.
And that's not even getting into how animals used to be butchered. Nowadays it's typically a quick bolt to the head but if you look at traditional practices for killing animals, some of them are downright gruesome. Halal is the first example that comes to mind with animals being intentionally bled out by slitting their throats to kill them.
"Not true for most When they killed something it had to either be preserved (usually with smoking or salting) or eaten, so there would be periods where there was a LOT of meat eaten during migrations etc. and long periods where mostly veggies were eaten. A lot would depend on tribe and location."
So when I said "some of which ate quite a lot of meat." I was 100% correct then?
Eskimos and the Souix are two groups who lived primarily off of meat just off the top of my head and that's all it takes for my statement to be correct.
"Being a vegetarian, in the end, is a luxury, not a necessity and only rich people can truly afford it."
Shit, I didn't read your whole post before posting. This also couldnt be more wrong. Poor people in third world country's are vegetarians or mostly vegetarians because they simply can't afford to eat meat like we do in the US. Only when you get into first world meat substitutes does vegetarianism get more expensive than meat.
Slashdot Mirror
"but it's far more likely that those who actually get off their ass and use a sauna are not the kind of lazy obese people that die of heart and lung diseases due to an inactive lifestyle."
How is using a sauna an active person only thing? Your assumption seems obsurd to me. To use one all you literally have to do is sit down for an extended period.
"There wasn't a single Democrat vote for it, and the Democrats derided it. Even if it passed in the House, it would not have passed in the Senate."
There wasn't a single Democratic vote for Trump's tax bill that put us even more massively in debt in either the House or the Senate either.
You're deluding yourself by not holding Republicans to their failures and the party's ideals become weaker for every person that does this.
"The US was the strongest defender of capitalism. Much of Europe was leaning towards socialist policies"
We have socialist policies in this country right here and now. Sorry but there has never been any danger of the West going communist on its own let alone Western Europeans who invented the concept of capitalism and are very capitalistic to this day. The only threat communism posed to the West was militaristic.
"There is no minority "right" for 99.9% of the people to respect the delusions of 0.1% of the people."
And once upon a time there were no rights allowed at all for the small minority that was black slaves either, What's your point?
Furthermore, they really aren't delusions if 51% of Americans believe that they should exist.
"I gave you a link for a real-world case. It was a locker room, not a public rest room."
Cool, so you spend your time looking at people's junk in changing rooms?
Honestly, I've never understood the objection to having a transgender person in the some changing room as the sex they identify as. Odds are you're not so attractive that anyone wants to look at you naked and if you are then you are way more likely to have a run-of-the-mill gay person taking a peak at you then a transgender person as they are generally interested in the opposite gender from what they identify as.
This is the last attempt that I know of by Republicans to pass immigration reform
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/27...
Republicans can not blame Democrats for failing by 90 votes when they have a majority in the House.
You're ignoring that the Republicans haven't even tried to use their majority in all areas to pass meaningful legistlation in regards to illegal immigration without that stupid wall attached.
Honestly, after the last election I was thinking "well at least we'll see the deficit cut and have something meaningful done about illegal immigration" which are two big reasons I'm an independent and not a Democrat. Now our defficit is significantly worse and all of the Republican attempts at immigration are tied to that albatross of a wall.
"Last century the rest of the world was moving towards communism..."
No it wasn't. Some portions certainly were but the entirety of the West never seriously entertained communism and neither did most third world countries.
"Transgender "rights" are for something like 0.1% of the population, of which 99.9% of society are required to reprogram themselves and respect the delusions of an extremely tiny minority."
One of the founding philosophies of this country was the need to protect minority rights.
"of which 99.9% of society are required to reprogram themselves and respect the delusions of an extremely tiny minority. "
Quite a bit of our population had to "reprogram" after slavery ended and the civil rights movement and we all agree we came out the better for it now. Maybe that's just the reprogramming talking though. What do you think?
Furthermore, it wouldn't be 99.9% requiring reprogramming, it would only be whatever percentage of people get enraged by some one taking a dump in a public rest room that matches the sex they identify with rather then the one they were born. Right now it looks like that is slightly less than half the country ( https://news.gallup.com/poll/2... )
"Yes, you are hard-left if you think that a biological male that "identifies" as a woman has a right to hang out with biological women with his male genitalia hanging [tmj4.com] out."
And you've never used a public rest room if you think that's what goes on in them. You make it sound like a porn shoot in one of those things. In all my time on this earth I've never seen a mans dick in a public rest room and we men use urinals. Lady's have all their sensitive business conducted in stalls.
"How is that going to happen when Democrats opposed [politico.com] an amnesty grant for "Dreamers" in exchange for an immigration overhaul? Do you think they're ever going to accept nationally mandated e-verify? Democrat states have become "sanctuary" states. Democrats have become the party of illegal immigrants."
Republicans control both houses of congress and the presidency. If the Democrats can pass the Affordable Care act under such conditions then Republicans should be able to do something infinitely less complex like make using an alreadying existing e-verify system manditory.
Also, much of the Democratic opposition came from wall funding but again, that shouldn't matter right now.
"It was only 25 billion for the wall, along with an end to chain migration, and a focus on merit-based immigration. What were the Democrats opposed to?"
For starters, there are a lot of independent estimates that are much higher for the wall, plus there is the yearly maintenance. Even if 25 billion is correct though, that's a hell of a lot for something unlikely to work when there are far cheaper solutions that likely will (as I have already brought up) After that, it doesnt matter what the Democrats want or don't want on other issues because, as I state above, the Republicans shouldn't need Democrat help under current conditions.
Honestly I think you're under the old Republican mindset from under Obama where Republicans would never hold themselves accountable for our governance which they had quite a bit of control of "cause Obama". The problem with that mindset is that Obama is gone now and Republicans control all of our government, including now the supreme court with this latest nomination and yet they can't do anything meaningful like pass successful legislation on one of their most significant planks.
Republicans blaming Democrats for our bad governance right now just highlights Republican lack of will to do something or their general incompetence
"Elections are managed by the states."
And would have continued to have been so if this funding had gone through.
Is it really such a stretch of the imagination for you that a country that looks to see their favored US presidential candidate elected through social media influence and hacking for dirt wouldn't be happy about lax voting security?
Or maybe you're just being willfully naive?
I voted for Gore and all but Bush winning that election did not even resemble a "hack". It all went by the books and Gore came up short in Florida.
Curse that old grandmother!
It's amusing to me how badly Republicans want to keep Hillary relevant nowadays.
"The Dems have moved hard-left as they've won issue after issue."
You gave me a chuckle there.
The only realistic way to determine how far out of wack a given ideology is, is to compare it to others so as to be able to put it on a spectrum. Relative to other first world countries our Democrats are mild conservatives when it comes to economics. On social issues (which is what you seem to have a hard on for here) they are very much in line with mainstream political views throughout the first world which means they are not "hard" anything.
"If Democrats were really serious about immigration, they'd work with Trump and bring a sane immigration policy that put American interests first."
If Republicans were really serious about illegal immigration they'd propose solutions to illegal immigration that would actually stand a chance at working well like making the already existing e-verify system mandatory for employers in this country. No jobs for illegal immigrants means no illegal immigrants, it's incredibly simple.
But no, stupid ideas like a massively expensive wall that will do nothing to change the simple supply and demand nature of illegal immigration and the labor they provide and thus do very little to solve the problem is what's popular right now among Republicans.
The interesting part for me is pondering why Republican politicians talk tough but won't propose plans that will actually have an impact on illegal immigration. The only motive I can see is that our food comes overwhelmingly from Red states and Red regions of Blue states and the food industry probably profits the most from illegal immigrant labor in this country. My best guess is that Republican politicians don't want to do anything to upset big Ag and stop the money from flowing from them.
That last part I will freely admit is pure speculation on my part but the fact that the Republican party is more concerned about making noise about illegal immigration than they are about solving it is easily observed.
You mean the great DMV service that's ranked 4th in the nation by the people who use it?
https://www.syracuse.com/opini...
But of course some one who uses such a dumb metric for determining how well a state is governed wouldn't even know how the state did in said metric.
Maybe describe what a notch is in the summary for those of us whose lives don't revolve around our stupid phones.
What you say makes complete sense but sadly there is a fairly large body of Americans who believe that the government doing anything is always bad. That coupled with big telecom money makes change almost impossible some places.
So what I said reworded?
""Mostly vegetarian" is not vegetarian."
Thanks for that genius. The point is that meat is not commonly eaten by third world poor because it's expensive so they are either vegetarians or mostly so because of cost. In other words, it is not a philosophical preference that drives many people to not eat meat, it's that meat is expensive and therefor being a vegetarian is not a "luxury" as you stated above.
This really should be common sense for anyone who buys their own groceries and cooks. For any given meal the most expensive thing on a meat eaters plate is usually the meat.
" Even though I'm not recommending to eat 10kg of meat per day, humans have evolved to consume some meat/fish and evolved to eat it because it has a much higher energy density than plants so you can eat less of it and require less energy to consume it."
This all has nothing to do with whether being a vegetarian is a luxury or not.
Have you seen pricing on grass fed beef? Most of our live stock is not grazed because that's too expensive in terms of land use. It's much cheaper to feed them corn and soy (people food) which is why we do exactly that.
That's fine.
Personally I'd choose the one that killed me instantly over the one that wouldn't.
Those high prices are thanks to the region's stupid growth planning. If prices are so high, where is all of the new construction? At those prices San Francisco and the Valley south of there should be on a building spree of new high-rise construction which would make tons of money for developers and push up housing supply which would lower prices for everyone. This isn't being allowed to happen by local government and now those people selling us our food live in poverty at $20 an hour.
The Bay Area's housing price problem is a simple problem of supply being kept artificially low in the face of huge demand. This has been going on long enough that it looks like it is finally effecting the region's economy.
You know what does that much faster and with less suffering?
A bolt to the head.
Oh yes, the magical golden age of animal rearing.
"...weren't bred entirely for yield"
Domesticated animals have been selectively bred since they were domesticated animals as that's how we got domesticated animals. These animals don't live in the wild naturally.
"...kept their entire lives in sheds in cages too small to turn around in, fed with hormones to make them grow faster and pumped with antibiotics to stop them getting sick in the cramped conditions."
Which is why it's great we have options in our grocery stores for animals that have not been raised as such.
"The treatment of animals as industrial commodities is offensive to many people."
Sadly the adoption rate for the above referenced ethically raised animal products isnt very high as indicated by what most grocery stores carry which means your "many" isn't very many.
And that's not even getting into how animals used to be butchered. Nowadays it's typically a quick bolt to the head but if you look at traditional practices for killing animals, some of them are downright gruesome. Halal is the first example that comes to mind with animals being intentionally bled out by slitting their throats to kill them.
"Not true for most
When they killed something it had to either be preserved (usually with smoking or salting) or eaten, so there would be periods where there was a LOT of meat eaten during migrations etc. and long periods where mostly veggies were eaten. A lot would depend on tribe and location."
So when I said "some of which ate quite a lot of meat." I was 100% correct then?
Eskimos and the Souix are two groups who lived primarily off of meat just off the top of my head and that's all it takes for my statement to be correct.
"Being a vegetarian, in the end, is a luxury, not a necessity and only rich people can truly afford it."
Shit, I didn't read your whole post before posting. This also couldnt be more wrong. Poor people in third world country's are vegetarians or mostly vegetarians because they simply can't afford to eat meat like we do in the US. Only when you get into first world meat substitutes does vegetarianism get more expensive than meat.