I’m not the person you replied to but I can comment to this effect. (Sorry for the wall of text - a lot of context to give about the American two-party system).

America has always found itself entrenched in a two party system. Periods that resemble now (very tight competition between the two parties) are very common in American history, but you do get occasional periods where a single party will be dominant for a long stretch. This says just as much about the unsuccessful party as it does the successful one: one is able to represent a large segment of American society, and the other is not. In this situation, the unsuccessful party will always rebrand to increase it’s relevancy (the alternative is that a party collapses and a new one forms, but that has not happened for >170 years). As an example, the Democratic Party (today includes Obama and Biden) once was the first choice for racist Southerners who were butthurt about the civil war. The Republican Party (today includes Trump) was led by the likes of Lincoln and was extremely progressive in racial issues for the time.

All this to say that the Republican Party doesn’t have to change in name or branding or even leadership to eliminate Trumpism and provide a platform for moderates. History tells us that, instead of a successful 3rd party rising up and replacing the Republicans, we will simply see a relatively short period (maybe 12-20 years) of Democrat victories and then the Republicans will be forced to adopt a more reasonable platform.

To an extent, this is already happening. In 2016, Republican Party leaders planned to adopt a platform that was more progressive on racial and women’s issues - they saw it as a lesson learned from their failures in the Obama era. Those same officials were blindsided by Trump’s popularity and had to pivot the opposite direction to meet the mood of the country. Despite Trump’s success though, his platform was never designed or planned as a long term strategy for winning elections and gaining support. Trump’s supporters are overwhelmingly old compared with his opponents, and thus are literally being replaced.

This should illustrate the extent of the republican party’s failure to adapt: they have won ONE presidential election popular vote since 1992. One. Out of eight that have occurred.

People like OP are an important part of this natural process of party realignment. OP rightly should be represented by a major party, but the modern Republican Party is failing to represent him. His is not a rare opinion in American political discourse; there are millions of people who would vote for more moderate conservatives if they had the option. One impact of this is that more far people are registering as “independent” voters than in previous years.

The end result of this, of course, is that the Republican Party is likely to change to represent people like OP over time. If people like OP begin to feel disillusioned with the Republican Party and it’s platform to the extent that they don’t vote, this process will only speed up. OP can do nothing better to quench the rise of far right trumpism than to be a political orphan for a while. That’s exactly what we’re encouraging by pointing out that his party hates him.

TL;DR

This dichotomy is not new in American politics and OP will actually do more to change the GOP from the outside than from the inside.

Never had that or met anybody who has. You should go to a doctor bro

After setting up the PC, search “defender” in the toolbar and poke around a little bit. The security settings are very intuitive, so I’m sure you can modify things to your liking.

Ngl I’ve had non-alcoholic beers that I could not distinguish from real ones.

(The same is not true for wine. Non-alcoholic wine is ass)

Strongly agree about iced tea and kombucha. Both can be bought or made at home, and are naturally complex, fruity, and diverse in flavor.

I think people suggesting very sugary drinks like coke are missing the point somewhat

Disturb the bag (shaking, turning, and rustling) as little as possible. Reach in with your hand or a spoon to get cereal instead of pouring it out.

It is really dumb to make it a hard cutoff in the first place. Colorado uses a system in which someone who is 15 can consent to sex with someone no older than 18. At 16 you can date consent with someone up to age at 19, and at 17 up to age 20. At age 18, people are considered adults and there is no longer an age limit to consent.

It is wholly necessary to protect children from sexual predators using age of consent laws. At the same time, it is a bit ridiculous to pretend that people in their teens don’t have sexual relationships with one another, and the law ought to reflect that. I certainly don’t feel that an 18-year-old should be considered a criminal for dating a 17-year-old, anyway.

Honestly as someone who is also in research, that is pretty understandable. Preprint papers are all subject to peer review and editing after the fact, but are a good opportunity to stake your claim on a big discovery before someone else can. Preprints are inherently not final versions and I guarantee that the mistakes will be caught before publication.

Okay so I agree that it needs to be peer reviewed and independently verified before we can trust it. But how exactly does the preprint look rushed?

Very true that it needs to be confirmed, but worth mentioning that every paper in history was at one point or another unreviewed and uncooborated. The fact that this isn’t yet doesn’t inherently mean anything bad for the quality of the results.

I’m just a biologist so I can’t weigh in to the credibility of the paper beyond that

I appreciate the recommendation but I don’t see my perspective on this issue as flawed or in need of changing.

I do have a lot of issues with the way wealth is distributed in capitalist societies… our income from work is a downright shitty attempt at approximating people’s value to society. Some people get more than they deserve and others get a lot less.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s wrong that at least a large part of a person’s value and worth should be determined by how they choose to spend their time. I see it as inherently unjust that someone who doesn’t apply themselves in a way that improves or maintains the world should be rewarded the same as someone who does.

The world is full of passions and hobbies that everyone would love to earn money from, but there are a lot of shitty, difficult, and hard jobs that need doing and but won’t get it without some sort of incentive. Thus, inequality, at least to some extent, is an essential feature of human societies that strive to improve over time. Every communist country has been wrought with inequalities under the surface, because they couldn’t motivate people without it!

This is not to say that anyone who honestly tries according to their ability deserve poverty, and I strongly believe in having a social safety net to help those people (I consider myself an Obama/Clinton democrat for reference).

While capitalism is an ultimately bad and inefficient way of rewarding people for their contribution to society, it would be far, far worse to fail to reward those that work extra hard, especially in jobs that are otherwise undesirable.

That’s the perspective I come from, and I think we simply have to agree to disagree.

I guess you’re right. You can say it makes me an asshole if you want, but I don’t think that person deserves the same credit or wealth as a person who got an education and used it to work full time in a specialized field.

I do not see that as a weird or unjust opinion.

I am guessing you are not very familiar with the antiwork community as a whole, but there are plenty of young people who truly no aspirations about contributing to society.

There’s a whole rabbithole to go down on that front. There’s also the term NEET which refers to (usually young) people who are “not in education, employment, or training.”

In other words, people who do not work or better themselves and survive using a combination of welfare and living with their parents or friends.

There’s also a lot to criticize about people who purposely under-employ themselves, like the antiwork moderator who lived with her parents, had no degrees or training, and aspired to be a dogwalker for 10-15 hours a week. She technically worked, but used others as a crutch to avoid doing anything more than the bare minimum.

I never said giving up a job to raise children is not labour, or that it doesn’t count as contributing to society. I was criticizing people who want to give up work to do nothing

Not at all! I think it’s enough for everyone to contribute according to their abilities. You’re making a living using your skills instead of mooching off of others, and that’s more than a lot of people can say.

I also believe that the vast majority of work benefits human society in some way or another, even if it’s sometimes harder to see. As long as there isn’t a scalable alternative to plastic, people need it to meet their daily needs and standards, and you contribute to that directly.

Because my “productivity” as you call it directly benefits the health and happiness of those around me. Likewise, it is impossible for you to eat modern food, live in a house, and go on the internet without directly benefiting from the labor of others.

I think it is, by definition, selfish to benefit from the labor of others without giving anything in return, if it’s at all possible for you to do so. You clearly have the mental and physical capacity to argue with internet strangers, and therefore you have the mental and physical capacity to carry out at least some labor.

I’m a biologist working on increasing the accessibility of pharmaceuticals and it’s totally my dream job!

There are days that I’m not exactly happy to be at work, but I can’t imagine how selfish and lazy I would feel if I gave it all up pursue nothing other than my own comfort.

Scarcity is relative and therefore will always exist. The value of the resources that an average person expects from their economic output is ever-increasing.

The average person living in North America 1,000 years ago would have been most concerned with the scarcity of food resources. 100 years ago North America was less concerned about food scarcity than the prior example, but orders of magnitude more concerned with the scarcity of goods relating to higher level needs: nice clothing, tools, quality living spaces, etc. Today, concern about the latter is partially replaced by even higher level needs: entertainment, technology, education, and luxuries. *(see bottom of comment)

This evolution in scarcity has been a consistently positive trend since at least the European renaissance, but I would personally argue that it started just after the fall of Rome (the last significant “market crash” in advanced civilization). If that continues, people in another 1,000 years could be most concerned about the scarcity of space flight vehicles or quantum computers, for all I know.

*My point here isn’t that nobody in North America is unable to meet their basic needs, just that the average person’s perception of what is scarce has changed over time on a societal scale. People never stopped feeling scarcity because their expectations have changed along with the availability of goods. There is no reason to believe that people will stop expecting better goods as society advances further and further.

I agree completely that Kropotkin is more right than your average social Darwinist or nazi, but all three use “evolution” as a concept to further their political interests, and do not correctly portray the reality or nuance of the Darwinian influences on primates societies. There’s a reason he had a reputation for being a crackpot among evolutionary biologists in the first place.

I’m as much for altruism as anybody else, but as a biologist I can’t pretend that Darwinian evolution promotes unbridled cooperation in groups of primates with no room for selfishness and competition… it is quite the opposite actually. Primate societies tend to be hierarchical and unequal, even within otherwise united groups.

Not to say that Darwinian evolution makes cooperation an impossibility; social conditioning and education overpower evolutionary instincts all over the place in human society. One only needs to look at things like religion and political ideology to understand that evolution and instinct are not the primary movers of human behavior nowadays.

Edit: To be clear, I am not saying that that supposedly Darwinian political beliefs like social Darwinism and naziism are driven by natural human behavior. I just want to point out that Marxist Leninist ideas can’t make that claim either. Almost no human ideas or institutions can. Except for cuckholding. That is a profoundly Darwinian behavior.