I know that "me too" comments are frowned upon, but I really feel the need to chime in here. Brazil is my favorite movie of all time. It is eerily prescient. It's important to keep in mind while watching it today that it was made forty years ago.
And yes, the director's cut. Absolutely the director's cut.
I'm not sure why you think that would've helped. A lot of the people who won't shut up about 1984 and Ayn Rand still vote for the closest thing to monarchy they can find on their ballots.
I think most of them would say that right up until they could actually feel the hunger. People spend hundreds of dollars on drugs that just make them less hungry so they eat less. So I don't think so.
Okay - democrats will push us in 1984 dystopia where they force you to accept that reality is what they tell you, and republicans will push us in low life high tech Cyberpunk dystopia where corporations reign supreme. Choose your poison.
Maybe the one where biological sex is imaginary. Or the one where Biden's health is good enough for another four years. You pick (or keep looking the other way and losing, to the detriment of far more important issues).
FWIW, like "conservatives" the stereotypes are not universal. They may not even be typical.
Biological sex clearly is not a fiction; we have lots of evidence that it's not something you choose. It's also not necessarily binary, even in humans, although it is mostly binary.
I also did not believe that Biden was ready for four more years, but then again, what choice did I have? I would not have voted for Trump under any circumstances, and sitting it out would be giving my vote away.
You're painting with a rather broad brush. You must have at least a few liberals in your life with whom you can compare notes.
> I also did not believe that Biden was ready for four more years, but then again, what choice did I have? I would not have voted for Trump under any circumstances, and sitting it out would be giving my vote away.
Not sure what you mean about it being a Trump, sit out, or Biden choice when Biden wasn't an option in the final election. The choice you had was to vote for someone else in the primary, which did have plenty of other people running (albeit no major names). Of course, the better thing would've been the Democratic establishment putting a better option in front of you for the primary, so that's not directly your fault, but is the fault of "Democrats."
> You're painting with a rather broad brush.
As are you when you call the Democrats' reality "the real reality."
> As are you when you call the Democrats' reality "the real reality."
I literally never said that. You also have no idea what my political background is. All I said is that I would never vote for Trump.
In fact, I do believe that there is one reality, because I am a scientist. For me, politics has nothing to do with it. I’m sorry that it does for you. It shouldn’t.
The person you replied to said, "democrats will push us in 1984 dystopia where they force you to accept that reality is what they tell you..."
You replied with, "Which reality is that? The real reality?"
So, yes, you "literally" did. You "literally" argued that "the reality Democrats tell you" is "the real reality," which also strongly suggests your political background. If that was just some kind of joke that you're now unable to stand behind, maybe you should think harder before you quip next time.
But it doesn't seem like it was just a joke. It seems like you're deluded enough to continue arguing that, from a purely "scientific" and "non-political" standpoint, Democrats never make false statements (and hence "the reality they tell you" is "the real reality"), despite there clearly being examples to the contrary.
We are talking about the same hepatotoxic compound that is absurdly easy to OD on but it gives negligible relief on stuff you should just power trough? That anecdotal - is barely better than a pacebo?
Personally - I think that the two main drivers of autism are people having kids later and too high rates of smart people intermarriage.
Of course Trump should not have said Tylenol, but paracetamol.
And there are some very mild hints in the data that they are correlated, but not enough sigmas.
And of course it could be Tylenol and something else with which ot interacts. And autism is so hard to be linked to anything because of how big the umbrella is and that we have such high delay to diagnosis that we will never know. Not taking medications when not really necessary is probably a good precaution principle
Until fairly recently, stuff line anti-vax was far more common on the left. There used to be a joke that it's fairly easy to find concentrations of anti-vaxxers in US - you just need to plot locations of Whole Foods on the map and then draw a circle around each.
(To be fair, though, this was never mainstream in the Democratic party the way these things are now among the Republicans.)
The right wing very vocally and openly calls for votes every election. In countries like the US and Canada voting is very obviously a scam - you get to vote for a few preselected candidates, and what determines the winner is actually the media and special interests who decide how much and what kind of coverage a candidate gets. Then, after the election, whoever wins just serves the special interests and is free to go back on every promise they made (and they always do). If you look at Canada (probably US too), every federal government for the last ~50 years, regardless of party, has had multiple corruption scandals involving various types of fraud and embezzlement of public funds. The RCMP, who are meant to investigate this, are top-down directly controlled by the PMO, who are free to block or shut down any investigation - and they do so routinely. There have been essentially zero punishment or repercussions for anyone involved and the scam continues.
Perhaps the GP comment was too US centric, but in the context of US politics, you can't really both-sides this argument or say that the right-wing are the champions of free and fair elections. The Republican party is by far the leader in voter suppression tactics, including closing polling places; restricting or banning mail-in or absentee voting; restricting who is allowed to vote; calling for partisan election observers; claiming fraud and abuse when they lose, in spite of a lack of evidence; and gerrymandering. On the last one, I don't dispute that the Democratic party also engages in gerrymandering, but it's hard to say that Democrats have been even close to as successful in that regard, and Republican gerrymandering is currently in the news as several states appear to be redrawing their voting districts specifically to benefit Republicans.
> you can't really both-sides this argument or say that the right-wing are the champions of free and fair elections.
Those are like two opposite statements, and I think you missed the whole point of my comment. You think you're in some noble partisan fight where your side are the good guys. In reality both sides work closely together to maximally fuck you over, while your cheer one of them on for some reason.
No, I'm far too cynical to believe that anyone has my interests at heart. But I will acknowledge one side as being openly anti-democratic while the other is merely spineless in the face of opposition.
My opening statement being contradictory was, admittedly, my fault. I couldn't tell if you were trying to champion the right wing or if you were trying to build a both-sides argument, so I tried to cover both bases. And that just made me look silly.
Both parties are very openly very anti-democratic and very corrupt. They openly sabotage and attack their own candidates if they don't fall in line (Bernie Sanders is one of MANY examples). They are pretty openly corrupt (look at Biden and family, look at all of the insider trading, etc), and pretty openly serve special/corporate interests like the military industrial complex. They constantly lie and try to misinform voters - which so very anti-democratic.
If you think one side is not anti-democratic, all that means is that you drank too much side-favoured coolaid.
I am going to put this as bluntly as I can: I don't like the Democrats, but they are not the party currently dismantling our government institutions and civil liberties with gleeful abandon. You can't "both parties" US politics right now and expect me to take you seriously.
The "both sides" argument, in the USA, does not at all stand up to even a little bit of scrutiny. Yes, both sides do various bad things, and individual politicians on both sides are varyingly corrupt. But only one side systematically obstructs social, economic, environmental, educational, and medical progress, and actively works to undo progress that has already been made. The other side generally, albeit slowly and stubbornly, moves things in a positive direction.
It's one thing if you genuinely think liberal, center left, and leftist policy is bad compared to authoritarian conservatism. That's wrong, but at least it's a strong and clear position, and the people who hold such beliefs usually do so for various personal reasons that are at least somewhat intellectually and morally understandable, even though they are usually incoherent and inconsistent.
It's another thing entirely to continue to hammer away at the "both sides equally bad" idea. It's flatly wrong, as a matter of simple fact. Pelosi insider trading simply does not compare in magnitude of damage to, say, the president more or less openly taking bribes to allow huge industry consolidation, or unraveling decades of American soft power abroad. You might also want to go look up the actual activity that took place under the Biden executive branch. I don't think anybody will argue against you that Biden was a problematic president. But you can't look at the policy enacted and carried out by his administration and claim that it's all a wash. It would be much more intellectually honest to say you prefer Trump's policy.
