Know your enemy. I feel like your chances of helping deprogram someone are higher if you know what bullshit they’re being fed. Then again I’m batting zero so who knows

Sorry, I did not mean to imply that the US doesn’t have bidets. My point was that I would like to leave the US, but having easy access to a bidet is a necessity for me when choosing the destination country.

I’ll do a swap for free for, if I’m being honest with myself, any country that you can buy a bidet in.

Maybe I’m too easy to please but I’d be happier if they took the money that currently goes towards tanks and “how to shoot first” seminars and put it towards ongoing education for officers on law, de-escalation tactics, and critical thinking in stressful situations.

This is the only area I DO get. I don’t agree with it, but I can understand where they’re coming from. If you believe a fetus is a person, it makes total sense to vote against murder. And we aren’t going to win anyone over by framing it as just an issue for women. If it’s even possible to change someone’s mind on the topic it would be through education, not telling them that their opinion on murder doesn’t matter.

I’m a bit concerned about that TBH. I’m not a doctor or medical researcher though so if they make one I’ll probably be an early adopter anyway. But since cancer cells are body cells with a problem, it feels like a screw up on a cancer vaccine would just lead to some exciting new autoimmune disease.

I don’t think we’re going to fix things in any meaningful way. I think we’re watching a big collapse. Not the end of humanity like some want to predict, but very rough times ahead.

I am with you that we should help each other out, and there’s ways to do that. We can feed and shelter people now, and we should, but much more than that becomes infeasible quickly. And I think it will become even less feasible as things get worse.

I think what the other person was saying is… If there’s a way to fix things, to make things better or at least lessen the harm, it’s going to take a lot of people doing a lot of things. Things that aren’t always profitable right away, but pay off later. Better public transit systems, more renewable energy, huge programs replacing the old but crucial infrastructure that brings us clean drinking water, turning useless land into productive fields, and so much more. If we had the political will, we could offer everyone the ability to work on these programs and in return have a better quality of life, while also building a better future.

And to be clear, this isn’t all manual labor. Probably most of it isn’t really manual labor. It’s math, it’s planning, it’s machine operation, it’s coordinating and transporting, it’s organizing and communicating. To solve our problems will require a lot of people with a lot of skills, and if we can encourage the right people to be in the right place, we could solve so many problems and make so many things better.

We won’t, though. But we could.

I genuinely believe it comes down to the moral question of: is inaction itself an action. Or maybe are you responsible for the results of not making a choice just as you would be if you did make a choice. I say yes.