politics

Should the rich not help the poor?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Should-the-rich-not-help-the-poor/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

People who ask this question have entirely missed the point.

It’s like asking the con artist who stole all your money if he can lend you a few dollars to feed yourself on a promise that you’re going to pay him back.

The rich are both responsible for the poor and are not responsible for them.

How does this work?

Simple.

The rich do what they do best, and they make as much money as they can so they can become rich.

How do they do that?

They spend all their time and energy scheming ways to extract every penny of value out of every moment in their lives and through every micro-transaction they have that most people think of as just spending time with friends.

Since they have the resources to influence legislation in ways that enrich them, that’s what they do.

Most people would take advantage of any opportunity they can to enrich themselves. Most people don’t have the resources to do that. Most people also don’t obsess about every penny everything costs or how much they can make from any interaction.

Life is transactional for the wealthy, not interpersonal.

The only true friends that some of them have are those they cannot extract wealth from and that are not a threat to their financial well-being. That means most of their interpersonal relationships are shallow and transactional. They experience very little to no emotional vulnerability. That part of them has been shut down.

What that means is they cannot feel anything for the poor. They can’t empathize with poverty on any level. Poor people are an abstraction to them, as inevitable as night and day. They don’t see themselves as responsible for the poor, nor should they because they have their own lives to live, and poverty has existed since the dawn of human civilization.

They were not the first contributors to poverty. Even up until a few decades ago, their wealth-building activities helped people rise out of poverty, and that’s where their imaginations live today.

They cannot conceive of how their successes are now responsible for creating poverty because they view themselves as above reproach. How could they be so wrong if they’re so wealthy?

That’s why people like Elon Musk can become such an overt egotist. It doesn’t matter how utterly disgusting any of his words or actions are because he’s so wealthy; he cannot accept that anything he does is wrong.

The real problem here is that the wealthy are the victims of their success, and that success has manifested in a system that automatically feeds that wealth. Instead of a system which regulates wealth to ensure it is adequately distributed throughout society to continue raising people out of poverty, it’s now become a system of parasitically draining people to the edge of existence. People now cannot survive without additional measures to enable their survivability.

During the heyday of middle-class growth, society spread money more equitably, and the economy grew at its most rapid rate ever. Few people want to believe this, but that was due to taxes.

High taxes on the wealthy were responsible for raising the most people out of poverty and contributed to the most growth of the economy.

Have a look at this tax chart:

Notice how the years circled by a red border comprise the highest level of taxes, the most aggressive economic growth, and the most expansive growth of the middle.

How does this work? It’s simple beyond belief.

High taxes on corporations, in particular, incentivize them to hire more people — voila, an instant job growth formula for the economy. Paying people more is much easier to bear when it means a tax deduction on the other end. High employment rates and fair compensation (also guaranteed by union negotiations) stimulate economic growth. Everyone benefits. People rise out of poverty. More people have more disposable income to buy the stuff that corporations make, which corporations benefit from.

High taxes on the wealthy contribute to fair wealth distribution throughout the system and allow prices to maintain some sanity so that the middle class isn’t deprived of their dream of home ownership.

Since the wealthy, through their corporations, need to keep investing their money to keep it growing, it means they begin encroaching in areas that would otherwise be accessible to the lower classes — and that mostly means real estate and real estate is a finite resource. Suddenly, most rental accommodation is no longer small mom-and-pop entrepreneur but a multi-trillion-dollar entity whose goal is to squeeze profit from every transaction. Living expenses skyrocket as a result.

What was once available for living accommodations on a standard metric of 30% of one’s income is now 70%-80% of people’s income — for just a roof over their heads.

Since real estate is a finite resource and the appetite for wealth acquisition is an immense monster feeding the people employed by this system, they’re constantly looking for new opportunities. In the real estate market, that’s now become mobile home lots and campgrounds.

One used to be able to rent a piece of land from a local owner and plant their mobile home on that lot and pay a small fee to maintain services. Since all the lots are now owned by corporate entities instead, fees have to increase every year at a minimum to keep up with inflation and a little extra profit built-in on top to make their budgets balance. It’s an automatic decision-making system where no one cares to pay attention to the few extra dollars being asked of people, nor do they care that every corporation is doing the same thing so that the few extra dollars asked of by each adds up to lots of extra dollars from consumers whose incomes have remained flat or shrunk throughout the decades.

Voila… an instant formula for making the poor ever more poor.

Now… have another look at that tax table and pay close attention to the tax rates outside the red lines — particularly before the red-lined years begin.

Notice how they coincide with major events like The Great Depression and World War 2.

Then, look closely at the tax rates after the red lines. Notice how we are repeating history.

That’s right. We are repeating history, and it shows in the tax rates.

What’s next is an economic collapse and worldwide conflict that may or may not escalate into an outright global war. We are at a point where global conflict is a certainty. As the American economy collapses due to the radical incompetence of a grifter whose primary motivation is self-aggrandizement, the rest of the world will be busy jockeying for position in an emerging new world order.

The wealthy are okay with this because they stand to benefit from it, just like they have with the boom and bust economies. It means excellent deals for themselves as they pick the bones of the casualties who won’t survive the meltdown. They are not loyal to any nation because the entire globe is their playground. Nationalism is for the sheep they manipulate to do their bidding.

How can Donald Trump truly believe his act of kissing the American flag when his bread is buttered from Russia? In this respect, he’s no different than most who place their loyalties in the hands of those who feed them.

The people he convinced to be loyal to him sincerely believe he will help them improve their lives. If the best they can expect is to destroy the lives of their enemies, at least they’re okay with that. As long as they can laugh at their fellow citizens, whom they’ve been taught to hate, they can accept impoverished conditions for themselves.

That’s when the mask will fall off, and they begin to realize that the impoverished conditions they live in that they’ve accepted also make them the most vulnerable to the destructive efforts of a corrupt leader whose sole purpose for leadership was personal benefit at the expense of a nation.

The real lesson here is that the only way out of poverty is to embrace the notion that we are all in this together.

United, we stand and divided, we fall.

A historic wedge has just been hammered into a cultural divide that’s been slowly growing over the decades as the wealthy have been pitting the little people against each other to distract us from their efforts at ripping us off to increase poverty levels.

Imagine, within a small group of friends, one with the highest income always manages to forget their wallet and sponges off their comrades when they go out to dinner together. Imagine how angry everyone gets, not by their sponging, but by their constant whining about how shitty the service is that they get and how expensive everything is.

Most won’t notice because they value loyalty to their friend and will displace their subjective resentment of their sponging and project it onto the wait staff and restaurant they dine at. Eventually, they get so pissed with the restaurant that they burn it down.

Meanwhile, none of them notice how they’re going to miss that restaurant, nor how they got pissed at it because one of their dining comrades needed a scapegoat to distract them from their sponging.

That’s where America is today.

Tomorrow, without the restaurant, everyone goes hungry while the one comrade who sponged off everyone gets to rely on their hoarded stash because they didn’t spend any of their own money on eating at the restaurant.

It’s not up to the individual rich people to help out individual poor people because that’s like pissing in an ocean. No single rich person can solve poverty. However, all of them working together to restore sanity to a broken system can function like creating a rule for the person who sponges off the rest that mandates they pay their fair share or be denied access to the restaurant.

Expecting a few altruistic wealthy people to make up for the greed of the rest is unfair to them.

Our system has been corrupted to punish those with good intent and reward those with evil intent.

That’s why we’re doomed to repeat history.

People watched Gordon Gecko’s claim, “Greed is Good!” and interpreted that as an inspiration instead of a warning.

Why do the rich spend so lavishly instead of helping those in need?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-rich-spend-so-lavishly-instead-of-helping-out-those-in-need/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

…because they can, and because they’re being rewarded for their success in accruing large sums of money with more money by the puppets they pay to play the role of a government representative of the people.

Why should they care about helping those in need if that fundamentally changes nothing about the existence of those in need?

Why should they cut back on their trips across the globe for their favourite ice cream to ease someone’s suffering for only a few moments while they continue to suffer throughout their lives?

Isn’t it just easier to let the suffering die so that they can be done with their misery once and for all?

Don’t we shoot horses when they break their legs?

https://youtu.be/qsKQiVJkEvI?si=gfT7KT5PNSX-G4rJ

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) ⭐ 7.8 | Drama

The real problem here is the concept of altruism. In an economically just world, altruism would be moot.

We already know that the executive boardroom is populated with the same density of psychopaths as a prison. Yet, we somehow expect they will be charitable enough with their money to sacrifice their luxuries to temporarily ease the pain of those suffering from unmet basic needs.

As individuals, they can only accomplish a little of anything.

As a group, however, we can ensure our system holds them accountable for their fair share of contributions to the world in which they disproportionately benefit from its bounties.

If they were held accountable for how they were at our height of middle-class growth, they would be more successful at helping all in need in proportion to their contributions as a whole because no one would benefit more or less from an act of altruism.

By returning tax rates on the wealthy to an Eisenhower level of progressive taxation, replete with the rules restricting corporations from benefitting from loopholes that permit them to escape a tax burden, we would resolve the needs of those in need on a systemic level.

We would not need to rely on a delusional expectation of the mega-wealthy to voluntarily practice austerity as has often been imposed upon the little people.

Have a close look at what happened to tax rates in the 1920s. That era was called the “Roaring 20s” because it had a booming economy due to the wealthy having much more disposable income. The same thing happened in the 1980s when Reagan dropped tax rates. The economy boomed briefly, and everyone loved Reagan because of it.

In both cases, those boom periods were finite and led, in the first case, to a worldwide war, while in the second case of Reagan’s tax cuts, it led to the “Great Recession.”

That’s what happens when large sums of money are released “out to the wild” for the peasants to get their trickle-down benefits. In the first case, that form of “voodoo economics” was called “Horse and Sparrow” economics because the Sparrow would benefit from all the food the horse hogged and shat out the other end.

That’s what trickle-down has always been. The little people get what the wealthy shit out as waste for them, and we’re supposed to find ways to live in dignity with that disgusting degree of indignity mounted onto our lives while we labour to make the rich wealthy.

It is precisely this dynamic that has been responsible for every social meltdown in history.

Meanwhile, if you look at that tax table, you’ll see the higher taxes resulted in the most tremendous growth ever for the middle class while the most significant number of people were lifted out of poverty.

None of it occurred because we relied on the generosity of greedy people but because we had our system tuned to maximize the benefits of a capitalist system.

“Trickle-down economies” are also called “boom and bust economies” because they go through cycles of recession and growth. The wealthy class loves this dynamic as the little people must suffer through periods of belt-tightening austerity. For the little people, austerity means having to go without essential needs being met, while for the wealthy class, austerity means excellent deals on going out of business sales. This is where they make their most significant cash grabs.

When small businesses thrive in a booming economy, they grow in value and expand while taking on more debt. That debt eventually crushes them when the cycle of a bear economy rears its ugly head. Many are forced to sell or go personally bankrupt and become devastated entirely for life. Many accept giving up the business that they grew out of love for what they were doing and allowed “an Elon Musk” to step in and claim credit for all their years of hard work while benefitting from that work to win humungous profits when the economy turned back into a bull.

It’s a class warfare game they have been playing with us as they corrupt the capitalist economy like it were a casino, and they’re the house that always wins, no matter how lucky any of the little people are.

This is why the guillotines come out whenever the little people figure out how badly rigged the game is against them.

The rich spend lavishly because they can and because they have rigged the game in their favour to specifically allow them to spend our money while programming the gullible among us to run interference for them as they victim-shame their fellow little people and accuse them of all the disgusting behaviours exhibited by the wealthy class, such as accusing the working class of wanting to steal the “hard-earned money of the rich” instead of demanding the money they stole returned to their victims.

The Disturbing Link Between Psychopathy And Leadership

Why are there more psychopaths in boardrooms?

Some care about those in need, but about 20% don’t, and they make it impossible to change the system because they invest billions in making it unfair while the rest reap the benefits of their corrupt activities. As a whole, they intentionally aim to strip the little people of our value precisely so they can spend gobs of money feeding their egos.

Due to their unrestrained behaviour, our species is on a trajectory toward extinction. Should we not push back on their greed and restore economic sanity, we won’t be able to continue at this pace, and we’ll be so severely humbled as a species that we may never recover, even if we survive the naive stupidity of our time.

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Who were the big winners and losers in the 2024 presidential election?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/Who-were-the-big-winners-and-losers-in-the-2024-presidential-election-3“

The biggest losers are the MAGAts.

They don’t see it yet.

By the second year of his term, they’ll start to wonder what’s going on.

By the time the next election rolls around, they’ll begin seeing it’s no longer “business as usual.”

They will begin to realize that he meant what he said when he said no one would have to worry about elections any longer.

That’s when the fear will creep into them… the last of them because many will have already undergone harsh awakenings when discovering that prices have skyrocketed while employment protections have vanished. They will freak out when they find out they cannot count on retirement as they struggle with minimal incomes to survive on bare minimums. The entire nation will plunge into a recession that could very well become a depression due to environmental and regulatory mismanagement that will make the Bush housing crisis and the “Great Recession” pale by comparison.

Drug prices will skyrocket, as will medical bankruptcies. Millions will lose their healthcare as employers will cut back on employee expenses, and nothing will prevent them from converting the entire working class into a slavery system worse than it is now. The economy will radically shrink through their isolationist approach to international politics, and whoever remains will fight their neighbours for scraps.

That’s not the worst thing for them to lose, though.

No.

The worst and most profound loss they will experience is the compassion of their fellow citizens who warned them.

When they begin crying foul, they’ll find no sympathy.

There will be no quarter for them. No sympathetic shoulder will await them when they realize they’ve hit rock bottom.

They will finally get the disdain they’ve consistently demonstrated toward their fellow citizens for decades.

They will find their hatreds finally reciprocated in the harshest of terms with a simple “we told you so.”

They will find doors of sympathy slamming shut on them because they won’t be the only ones suffering from their hateful motivations. The entire nation will learn to hate MAGAts on such a visceral level that an escalation of antagonism will become the norm for the following unpredictable number of years — possibly the entire next century.

They’re going to learn how the fabricated hatred they’ve been displaying toward their fellow citizens is nothing like genuinely earned hatred.

When they finally realize the profundity of what they have lost, it will be experienced as a prolonged moment of debilitating horror that transfixes them. They will mourn the loss of a nation they professed to love. They will be overcome by paralyzing guilt accompanying the realization that they killed it by their ignorant and envious “stick-it-to-the-libs” attitudes, their hateful projections, and their self-fulfilling prophecies of doom they feared were to be caused by their fellow citizens.

They will have only themselves to blame. They will become this century’s brownshirts in the aftermath of the destruction they wrought against their people, neighbours, and fellow citizens. The entire world will regard them like drug addicts who have hit rock bottom and can’t be trusted ever again.

When they finally achieve their moment of harrowing clarity, it will be too late to turn back the clock and regain the stature of world power they enjoyed. The entire world will have marginalized the nation while permanently considering it a threat to global peace and security instead of its protector.

They will discover such a profound degree of shame accompanying a sense of loneliness and being lost and adrift in a massive ocean surrounded by the enemies they made of their fellow citizens that many will turn to suicide… and worse, no one will care if that’s what they choose for themselves. Many will feel the same relief they did when Rush Limbaugh finally stopped polluting this Earth with his hateful noise.

It will take all of the rest of this century for Americans to recover their dignity.

Why doesn’t the government give everyone 1 million each to save people from poverty?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-doesn-t-the-government-just-give-everyone-1-million-each-to-save-people-from-poverty/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

That’s an utterly ridiculous idea for many reasons. Probably the best example for showing how utterly absurd this idea is is not the devastating impact it would have on the economy.

The best example of why this idea represents a monolithic level of naivety is what happens when people win lotteries.

Massive lifelong windfalls are often mismanaged because people have no experience managing large sums and overestimate how far that will take them.

It’s much better to adopt the approach the wealthy class adopted with their children.

Providing people with enough to meet their needs until they can manage their affairs intelligently.

If they are responsible and resourceful, they will find they won’t need to rely on their entire inheritance to survive when it becomes available.

We are all part of a system into which we were born and collectively form a social contract by which our cumulative efforts guarantee the health of the whole.

Since we produce more than we consume, society is accountable to all its members to ensure everyone benefits enough to meet their basic needs.

The government should not participate in and create upward wealth redistribution schemes but spread the cumulative wealth to ensure people can survive with dignity.

We are at a point where it is not only feasible but inherently a superior form of economic management than we have in place now.

It will become ever more clear to ever more people as we march headlong in our transition to a fully automated society and entire classes of jobs vanish to be replaced by robots and AI.

Creating a sustainable lifeline gives people the space to be innovative because people are naturally creative problem solvers. Allowing people to determine their life course based on their interests is the quickest and most effective way to motivate them to invent new solutions to innumerable problems we all collectively face daily.

The solution is not a windfall because that is entirely counterproductive and a short-lived benefit with dramatically adverse effects on our economy that would radically increase poverty.

The solution to our economic and social issues is to provide for the basic survival needs determined by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Food, shelter, clothing, security, and the ability to invest in oneself to build a future with dignity for oneself and one’s family.

Most people’s needs are modest and don’t require a radical sum of money to transform their lives without effort magically.

Most people rise to the challenge of building a better life if they can access systems instead of being barred from access because of prohibitive costs.

For example, instead of giving away money to drain into a sinkhole, provide free access to education, and people will take advantage of that to create better opportunities for themselves on their own and without any prodding.

The difference between thinking of supportive solutions and cynical solutions like this question is between a disparagingly misanthropic view of humanity and one’s neighbours and a caring and supportive view of one’s fellow citizens as human beings simply trying to live their best lives.

The sooner we can cure ourselves of this wholly destructive attitude toward each other that we have allowed to fester and grow in society, the sooner we can progress in making this a better world for everyone.

This wholly cynical view of humanity is cultivated mainly within the MAGAt crowd. It is deliberately cultivated by a small percentage of sociopathic billionaires who routinely dehumanize people and pit us all against each other so they can continue stripping us all of our dignity while ripping us off by the tens of trillions of dollars to send us into poverty and destitution while they laugh at our misery.

Why does the Republican Party attract the uneducated?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-Republican-Party-attract-the-uneducated/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

They use slogans and soporifics to reinforce tribal associations and loyalties while motivating them to unite in solidarity over perceived common causes.

“Low taxes”
“Small government”
“Fiscally conservative”
“Save the unborn babies”

They use slogans to ignite passions driven by anger, envy, fear, and hatred to motivate them to act in solidarity against perceived enemies.

“Voter fraud”
“Nanny State”
“Migrant violence”
“Killing unborn babies”
“Immigrants stealing jobs”

As long as they can convey their ideas within a few syllables and tweak people’s emotions while doing so, they never have to bother with nuance, insight, context, complexity within grey areas, or even hypocrisy, for that matter.

None of their positions are consistent in any way. They can’t be, but it doesn’t matter to the uneducated because they don’t want to parse their slogans for meaning. They want to remember them well enough to hurl them as weapons, while the extent of their political arguments amounts to the level of a cheerleader for a sports team.

They hate the “nanny state” but demand draconian government measures to rule their lives.

They want a government that’s so small it fits inside every woman’s vagina and monitors everyone’s lives with Big Brother oversight without realizing how that bloats the government. They demand government expansion to incorporate unnecessary and paranoia-quelling functions that increase the problems that would otherwise not exist without their efforts to make issues manifest as problems.

Trans people pose no problem to society, but because they don’t fit preconceived notions of what is an acceptable definition of a human, they’re rendered as threats without any justification for the unimagined threat they allegedly are. Ask them how another’s marriage impacts them, and they immediately resort to abstractions rather than concrete reasons why their personal lives are threatened. Wisps of the imagination threaten them because that’s the natural consequence of ignorance.

They want low taxes and think it’s only fair to lower taxes on the wealthy. They believe the rich people they envy will trickle down their wealth to them and improve their lives because they both hate intelligence and revere what they interpret as intelligence in the accrual of riches. They can’t discern between the two because they can see wealthy people all around them who are just as intelligent and under-educated as they are. That prompts them to believe they’re smart enough to become just as successful. In this case, they’re not far from the truth but overlook variables like privilege, luck, and association as primary influences of wealth acquisition.

Fortunately, the primary solution to the problems they cause in society is already presented within the question. Education.

We can improve our education systems so that people are not intimidated by education simply by teaching them to love education.

It’s not that daunting a challenge.

Much of education is a process of rote remembering rather than teaching critical thinking skills.

Education should equip all learners with the appropriate attitude of education as a lifelong process. Once people understand and embrace the value of an education-oriented mind, they become less prone to being led around like lost sheep and begin to parse information in greater depth. Once one learns to love education, they also learn to love nuance because they appreciate the subtle shifts in perspective the mostly invisible aspects of communication convey.

For example, people are fascinated by and love learning how scams are set up to exploit the naive because the insights they get improve their sense of security. Once one knows how a grift works, one feels less intimidated and more secure when encountering a grifter.

Most people no longer fear Three-card Monty because they know how the game works and often partake for the sole pleasure of spotting the trick moment that swaps out the card to fool people.

The problems in today’s world are far more daunting than a simple game, and the complexities we have to deal with in modern living are overwhelming to the undereducated. Without bringing them up to speed, we’ll see an increasing division between those who are privileged enough to gain a proper education and those who resent them for being deprived of life skills they’re daunted by but innately understand are necessary advantages in today’s world.

They will often mistrust the educated because they can’t figure out the game being played, and the paranoia of being manipulated by someone whose education intimidates them drives them away from the potential assistance they can gain from them. It’s much easier for the under-educated to affiliate themselves with others who echo their struggles. It’s much easier for the under-educated to trust someone who speaks in the same simple language they do because it makes them feel like life hasn’t left them behind.

Until we improve our education systems such that education is universally viewed as a fundamental support for a stable nation and make it universally accessible at all levels, we will continue to struggle with the impact of our failure to equip our citizens with the skills necessary to develop a fully manifested democracy. As long as we continue to abandon the under-educated to the wolves, there will always be a political party seeking power through the exploitation of their ignorance.

Why is the American left so obsessed with abortion?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why is the American left so obsessed with abortion when contraception is so freely available and easy to apply?”
Other answers (about 55 at the time of this posting) to this question can be read via the following link: “https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-American-left-so-obsessed-with-abortion-when-contraception-is-so-freely-available-and-easy-to-apply“

People have given incredibly poignant answers to this disgusting question, but you don’t care what they have to say. It’s all just rhetoric to you. It means nothing to you because you don’t have to personally deal with the reality of being denied access to life-saving treatment.

Your fake profile name already suggests you’re only interested in pushing buttons and watching the left get triggered.

The suffering of others holds no weight for you unless it becomes a part of your experience.

That’s just how you are… but that’s not what’s so disgusting about this question.

It’s horrifying that you’ve been so broken that you’re okay with contributing to the murder of innocent women… but that’s also not what’s disgusting about your question.

Have you noticed how all the answers aren’t actually about abortion?

They’re all about saving lives and explaining how important it is to have access to healthcare.

But you don’t care about that, just like you don’t care about the lives you’re responsible for ending with your attitude toward abortion.

No.

Your question proves you revel in all that.

You are okay with women dying because you believe that’s justice.

It’s just righteousness to you that they die.

At least that’s what you want to believe even though you struggle to accept that, and your doubt shows through the cracks in an attempt at an innocent facade in your question.

You ask why people on the left are obsessed with abortion, but they’re not.

Not one of these answers shows an obsession with abortion.

They show concern for life.

Don’t you find it strange that the alleged “pro-life” people who are supposed to value life don’t value it at all?

Yet, somehow, they have focused on forcing women to undergo a full birth in all cases because they hate abortions… while they claim to be defending a child’s life — as they ignore living children dying every five seconds due to preventable causes. (That’s at least ten-to-fifteen children that will have died in the time you spent reading this answer.) You blatantly lie about caring about life, and you lie in this question about who’s doing the obsessing over abortion.

It’s not the left who’s obsessed with abortion.

You “pro-lifers” have been obsessed with abortion since Roe v. Wade was instituted.

Once that protection for women was instituted — and to be clear, it was instituted to protect women from dying unnecessarily — the American left stopped thinking about abortion. Women were getting the treatment they needed… so there was no point in having to think about it any longer.

The anti-abortion crowd didn’t stop thinking about it, though. They became even more obsessed with it and hunkered down on a fifty-year strategy to repeal the law and ban abortion.

Throughout all that time, they’ve never bothered to learn why abortions happened. They have maintained precisely the same depraved attitude you demonstrate within this question.

You sincerely believe abortion is just another form of contraception, and worse, you don’t care what the reality is. You mock the nightmare of having to undergo an abortion procedure while comparing it to the contraception you’re also blocking access to.

You’re obsessed with women who undergo abortion procedures because you believe they’re trying to weasel their way out of unwanted pregnancy… and you assume that’s not supposed to be permitted… even if they’re rape victims and not the whores you want to believe they are.

That’s what makes you evil… your hypocrisy, your iniquity, and your insistence that your disparaging fiction is reality without caring in the least about the horrifying experiences women suffer through as you gleefully kill them with your indifference.

That’s right… you are a murderer, just as if you pulled the trigger on a gun to end their lives by your hand. Your support of denying women the life-saving treatment they need means you have, according to this quick AI summary, been responsible for the unnecessary deaths of almost two thousand women as a consequence of your obsession with abortion.

Your obsession with abortion is responsible for almost the number of lives lost on 9/11.

You’re worse than a terrorist because you behave as if you are protecting lives instead of destroying them and committing manslaughter with your depraved ignorance.

No one on the left is obsessed with abortions, but you already knew that. You want to wipe your hands clean of the evil that you and your ilk have been perpetuating… you know what you’re doing is wrong, and you’re having fun with it… and that’s what makes this question and you so inhumanly disgusting.

What are the implications of a two-party system on democracy in the United States?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/What-are-the-implications-of-a-two-party-system-on-democracy-in-the-United-States-1”

Well, that’s simple… Gridlock.

You’ve been watching it in action for a couple of decades now.

Whatever one party initiates, the other dismantles.

The fine arts of negotiation and compromise no longer exist because one party views that as submission while the other regards that zero-sum game attitude toward cooperation as toxic and prone to counterproductive and even destructive initiatives that create problems without solving any.

For example, there is no rational justification for abortion restrictions. The entire issue is a non-issue stoked up to an irrationally unhinged fervour based on two misanthropic lies, that abortions are a lazy excuse for birth control by whores, and that they are acts of murdering babies. Neither perception resembles anything remotely true or anywhere near accurate renditions of reality.

They are lies stoked for the simple reason of creating political alignments on the vector of hating one’s fellow citizens. Since about 80% of the population is against abortion legislation, it’s been hijacked by the tyranny of a minority and leveraged as a power grab for a political party. The overblown abortion issue is a political wedge and a fundamental betrayal of a democratic system. This would not be possible in a multiparty system.

A two-party system is a recipe for conflict. In contrast, multiparty systems have been denigrated as being incapable of progress. The reality is that multiparty systems encourage negotiation and compromise among varying ideologies that more accurately reflect the expressions of individual beliefs than the aggregated pools of power occurring within a duopoly.

Another major disadvantage of a two-party system is that it limits the spread of investments the ownership class requires while choosing campaigns to finance. It’s a win-win system for them because it’s the cheapest way to hedge their bets. They can’t afford to spread their campaign investments to many parties in a multiparty system. So, their influence in politics is significantly diluted, and the will of the people is much more accurately represented by the diversity of ideological voices in Congress.

A further, much more subtle, and arguably the most profound impact on society is the homogenization of public thinking through aggregating issues into bundles. All nuance is bred out of each issue as it becomes incorporated into a party package to be accepted wholesale — like a cable deal where you can’t opt for individual strategies or solutions. It’s an all-or-nothing approach to addressing political issues that pressures the electorate to reduce the political process to the level of cheering for one’s party, like a sports team.

A two-party system cannot but lead a nation toward escalating internal strife as party positions become increasingly polarized. One party may successfully drag the other party into its ideology. However, that flexibility and willingness to accommodate the other can only go so far before the opposing party must run backwards in the opposite direction. That’s where the DNC is now, after decades of capitulating to a fascist rightwing leadership banking the complete corruption of a democratic system on the corruptibility of their opposition.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/wednesday-september-23rd-meet-middle

BONUS — Reposted from Facebook

A Worthwhile Share, Given How Close D-Day is:

Stop Project 2025 Comic
Trump’s Project 2025 is a detailed plan to shut you up, and shut you out. Don’t let it do either. Read on, then vote.stopproject2025comic.org

Download the .pdf:

Click to access STOP_P2025_COMIC_BOOK.pdf

Can Kamala Harris prove she worked at McDonalds?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “https://www.quora.com/As-Donald-Trump-can-not-prove-his-accusation-that-Kamala-Harris-lied-about-working-at-McDonald-s-can-she-prove-she-has-and-should-she/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1”

Out of curiosity, do you not find it odd that Donald Trump is focused on this issue?

He is someone who has become well-known for breaking records for lying about so many things, ranging from relatively benign self-aggrandizement to malignant acts of manslaughter during a pandemic while encouraging people to dismiss the severity of a virus that killed millions worldwide.

His lies while in office killed hundreds of thousands of people, while his continued lies threaten even more lives.

Stack all of this up with one statement Kamala Harris has made about her experience as a teenager — a widespread experience for teenagers everywhere. A LOT of teenagers enter the world of work through the fast food industry. (Full disclosure — I worked for two years in a McDonalds restaurant from 15–16.)

It’s beyond a common experience and is the kind of experience that contributes absolutely nothing political toward one’s future beyond whatever one learns from the experience and money one earns. It may open some doors to other employment as a youth or young adult, but it contributes almost nothing tangible toward a long-term professional career — much less to politics.

Her claim is a one-off comment that shows how she can connect with average people living average lives. That’s about the extent of the impact that claim has.

“I’m normal. I’m like almost everyone else. I’m not weird like some people are.”

That’s the extent of the impact of her statement.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump tries to capitalize on his doubt that she had a “normal upbringing” without the privilege he’s benefited from his birth lottery. Nothing about her somewhat average background is a mystery to the public. Still, somehow, she’s being challenged, not only by Trump on this claim but also by his army of supporters who somehow believe this invalidates her candidacy.

Meanwhile, he tries to pass off a lie that he cares about ordinary, working-class people while selling cheap running shoes at horribly inflated prices or $100,000.00 watches that his contract says he has no obligation to deliver on. How exactly does that serve ordinary, working-class people? It doesn’t. It’s a money laundering scheme in which his buddy Vladimir can dump millions into his campaign war chest without tracing his collusion back to an enemy nation.

How exactly does the claim by Kamala Harris, even if it were a lie, stack up with lies told by a lifelong grifter hated by so many people worldwide for his destructive behaviour that he has stacked up a record number of lawsuits against him?

He brags about ripping people off, and somehow, people want to believe that Kamala Harris’ claim of working at McDonald’s as a teenager is enough to disqualify her as a candidate for a job in which the current administration she has been a part of has shown itself beyond capable of fixing the mess that Donald Trump left behind that will take decades to repair.

Ask yourself why people would care even if she did lie. It isn’t because such a lie is something they can’t tolerate because they tolerate life-destroying lies, so why would a benign lie like this matter in the least to people?

The problem here has nothing to do with Kamala Harris and everything to do with people who pretend to be patriots while behaving in the most treasonously hateful manner toward their fellow citizens every day.

Kamala Harris does not need to “prove” anything because she has already proven herself well beyond more capable than a lying grifter who has been deemed the worst president in American history.

What should be happening right now, if Americans have any self-respect and pride in their history and their status on the world stage, is for Donald Trump to be laughed off every stage he stands on instead of being entertained like drunk, old Uncle Fogarty. This embarrassing idiot decides, at a town hall, to play multiple versions of Ava Maria for 40 minutes instead of answering questions.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/wWwD5WBnqbwdvLeN/https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-music-town-hall-1.7352277

After all of this, how can whatever job Kamala Harris did or did not do as a kid matter to anyone in the least?

The truth is that it doesn’t matter to anyone. They have to make a stink about something because the corrupt nature of politics today is that although it’s supposed to be about solving common problems, a significant proportion of the population treats politics as a war game against one’s fellow citizens.

Until (some) people learn to work together with their fellow citizens (as diverse and different from themselves as they may be) instead of demonizing their “honourable opposition,” the only direction the nation will head toward is another civil war.

I’m sure even these guys don’t want to be in a literal war with their fellow citizens.

How do you know if you are right and others are wrong?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-know-if-you-are-right-and-others-are-wrong/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

The first place to start is to give up the notion that being “right” or “wrong” matters more than being accurate, informed, and knowledgeable.

“Right” and “wrong” are egotistical expressions that either stroke one’s sense of self or dismantle one’s self-confidence. Neither is helpful to oneself, others, or the issues at play.

As I often find myself checking out profiles to gain context into the querent’s mind, I did so with yours and am pleased to discover that you’re already on the right track.

Fundamentally, we’re all fumbling about in the dark and clueless, even about things we think we know. The worst thing we can do is believe we are “right” because that perspective contributes nothing to one’s growth and kills one’s ability to explore beyond that point.

No matter how “right” we might feel about something or how complete we think our knowledge of something, there is always something to learn about it that will be new to us. There is always a different perspective on that thing that we have not yet encountered.

If we could all adopt the perspective of being clueless, our world would experience far fewer conflicts because people would be more open to the perspectives of others.

Unfortunately, we live in a world built upon the foundation of exploiting insecurity at all levels throughout society — whether selling hair products or climbing corporate ladders. Insecurity has been weaponized as a tool of manipulation for personal gain over and above benefiting society as a whole.

We have never been more fortunate than we are today when confronted by the limits of our knowledge and understanding. Solving the problem of being unsure about one’s position means simply whipping out one’s means of accessing a comprehensive knowledge base to conduct basic research to verify if one’s position contradicts facts.

There is no real point in engaging with others to determine if one’s compass setting on knowledge is on true north by triangulating it with the settings of others because one is just engaging in an egotistical fencing match at that point. Online “debates” are often more about egotistical masturbation than they are about deriving an objective apprehension of issues to determine pragmatic resolutions.

Sharing information obtained through research efforts is far more rewarding and less prone to conflict over subjectively defined notions of being “right” or “wrong.”

One can still certainly derive flawed conclusions on matters, but that’s also a function of incomplete information that may be deemed “wrong.” Adding to one’s information base is less about determining “right” or “wrong” and more about ensuring the completeness of knowledge in a subject domain.

Knowing the difference in a dynamic with someone else on this level is essentially determined by whether or not the critic of one’s knowledge adds to one’s information base or disparages one’s person as a reaction to the information conveyed.

To directly answer your question, after all the verbiage I packed into this long-winded answer, is that you will know by the content of your critics’ arguments.

You can always deem yourself “not wrong” if the other party adds nothing to your position. If they can add valuable information to expand your knowledge base, you can still consider yourself “not wrong” while learning to be “more right” by their contribution.

This is how you can preserve your superior perspective of evolved humility by remaining confident in being clueless.

Congratulations on achieving a higher level of awareness than most of us monkeys ever attain throughout our very challenging lives.

Cheerios.

Can Trump-haters admit that his multi-million dollar donation to hurricane relief efforts is a good thing?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Question for all you Trump-haters — Can you at least admit that Donald Trump’s multi-million dollar personal donation to hurricane relief efforts, and the $7 million raised through his and Jason Aldean’s joint effort, are a good thing?”

I have a better question.
How can you possibly believe anything he claims?

  • He taught his kids how to steal money from kids dying from cancer.
  • He claimed to forgo his salary as President and spent over $100 million of taxpayer dollars on golfing. The annual wage of a US president is $400 thousand. He spent more than four times the salary he allegedly claimed to reject in four years.
  • He profited from charging taxpayers for the residency of Secret Service at Mara Lago because he refused to stay in the Whitehouse to the tune of $2 million taxpayer dollars. He insisted they stay at his residence and charged them for being there to protect him. Taxpayers paid not only for their salaries but for the profits he made, which constitute the total amount of the four years his salary as POTUS cost taxpayers.
  • He claims to be a billionaire when trying to impress people but sells over-priced junk products to the poor people he claims to be in support of.
  • He’s a convicted felon in a world where charges alone are enough for most people to convict the recipient of charges who automatically believe everything they say is a lie. People still believe Johnny Depp lied and Amber Heard was an innocent waif — even after learning she defecated on his bed. He was convicted on 34 counts and should be rotting behind bars right now, and you believe his words at face value.
  • The Washington Post has a 3-year-old article on Trump making 30,573 false or misleading claims during his tenure in office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/ I understand how easy it might be for you to wave your hand and call it fake news as if they pulled that number out of a hat, but that’s not the case at all. Those incidents are verified by various fact-checking organizations that have taken the time to tally all his lies. Anyone like Trump can lie as often as he wants but never backs up those lies with evidence. Meanwhile, evidence of over 30 thousand statements by Trump has been presented.
  • With such a horrendous tally of lies, I could go on for hours regurgitating examples of Trump’s lies, but that would be pointless. The fact that you can overlook all this publicly available information and then come on here and declare another lie is proof positive that there is no reason to hate someone responsible for more American deaths than Osama Bin Laden is proof on its own that you have serious mental health issues to deal with. You’re even giving Trump credit for an effort that was mostly Aldean’s work.

Do you have even the slightest clue what that kind of thinking indicates?

Here’s a photo of what your question represents:

One of those bodies is you.

That’s what you represent.

A cult member who insists the drinks being served will bring everyone closer to God.

The sad thing is that you’re telling the truth while your Reverend lies his ass off and is planning his escape like Jim Jones tried to, while your body lies rotting on the ground.

Which brings me back to my original question as a response to your question:
How can you believe anything he says, even worse, without asking for a receipt to verify he did what he said he would do?

Before you answer that question, here’s another:
Did you accept or reject the proof of Obama’s birth in both his short and long-form birth certificates?
If not, then why not?

Why would you accept the word of someone who breaks records for lying (and is motivated to lie to you because if he doesn’t, he’ll end up in prison) and reject the proof of Obama’s birth?

Do you not see a double standard in all of this?

You can’t be that disconnected from reality, can you?

You know you need help but are too afraid to do the right thing.

Cowards always are.

Do the right thing for a change before you regret getting what you’re asking for.

Be brave and vote for a woman.