/townhall/ - Townhall

As outlined in this video by Now This
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh4nhkuvuFc
In the state of California, Minimum wage is not a livable wage (if you're a single mom just trying to make ends meet).

This video, intended to argue for the raising of minimum wage, raises a common outcry "Minimum wage isn't meant to be a living wage!"

The question I pose is this: How should this hypothetical single mom earn her livable wage? If Minimum wage is meant to be for an unencumbered 15-25 year old to earn job experience, and a single mother is forced to try to live off of that wage, which part of the system is broken, and how would you fix it?

i was talking to a dear friend the other day, about how to address others who you do not agree with. And it got my wondering whether or not our differences came from how our respective cultural communities handle issues thrust upon them

i am an Asian American. in my life, my family, my community, and all people of my culture have a general understanding of how to handle conflict.

There is a sort of put your head down and power through mentality that comes with East Asian culture. A sort of don't punch up, work within the system mentality that comes from millennia of Confucianism.

It gives us the appearance of meekness to the white American majority, but also the appearance of cooperation. A model minority.

On the flip side, black culture does not have this same millennia of Confucianism that East Asian cultures have.

It makes me wonder if, perhaps, it has been presumptuous of me to focus so much on how i have been taught to handle conflict when having discussions on the nature of conflict with my friend.

i believe it is immensely important to understand where another individual is coming from, even if you immensely disagree, and that you will only be understood if you can understand yourself, and that if heads are being butt together, there is not going to be any useful result.

What do you think? i will state as well that i could not think at all of the right way i wanted to word this topic, but still felt it would be good to discuss.

Since this is a board where careful logical reasoning is important, I thought it might be good to have a thread for practicing this skill.  Please feel free to contribute any exercises you might have.  I'll start with one, below:

Consider the following proposition P: "An outlet for population overflow is required for a country's economy to prosper."
Now the consider the following argument A against proposition P: "We need only look to our own shores to find counter-evidence: Cuba has long been able to discharge its surplus population by sending people here, and yet its economy has done quite poorly."
Why is A an invalid argument against P?

Do you frame your political philosophy more in terms of what you support, or what you oppose? How do you think this influences others' perception of your politics, as well as your own? If it's a conscious thing, what's your reasoning behind it? Is your reasoning consistent?

Even when this choice ultimately boils down to two mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive sides of the same coin, I find that framing and connotation still influence the way beliefs are communicated and understood.

For instance, I tend to more frequently describe myself as anti-capitalist than socialist. This is in part because I have more conviction in capitalism being fundamentally flawed and unethical than I do in socialism being the best alternative, and also in part to avoid semantic confusion over what socialism actually means.

I'm also more likely to call myself anti-authoritarian than libertarian, because I believe the status quo in most of the world is authoritarian, and identifying authoritarianism as the problem by positioning oneself as explicitly opposed carries more of a proactive implication that it authoritarianism is a problem that needs to be addressed, compared the relative passivity of framing oneself as libertarian, which could just as well mean more liberty and autonomy is preferred or wanted rather than a necessity. (There is also a semantic problem here, particularly in the US, where the term "libertarian" is associated more with Randian right-libertarianism and the capital-L Libertarian party.)

But, I tend to describe myself as for LGBTQ liberation rather than anti-$(sexuality/identity)phobia. This is because the core of my position is that LGBTQ people have rights and dignity and deserve liberation/empowerment/respect; bigotry and discrimination are bad, but they're bad as a corollary of the previous statement, not the other way around. At first glance, this seems to contradict my anti-authoritarian/libertarian reasoning, but "liberation" carries an explicitly proactive connotation -- and, indeed, if true LGBTQ liberation were achieved, the potential harm done by bigotry would be orders of magnitude less severe.

Note: this thread is intended to be about pro-/anti- framing in particular, the reasoning behind it, and how this influences the way beliefs are communicated and understood, not about value judgments or scrutiny pertaining to specific views themselves, except where directlPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

The country is spending too much compared to what we take in. I think we all agree. But what to be done? I found this interesting calculator where you can roughly dictate policy and try to, not balance the budget, but sorta fix it.

http://www.crfb.org/debtfixer/

Let's just assume the premise on this website is right, that the estimates are good as far as estimates go, and the idea of getting the budget to the rates it asks is important. What I want to see is what people choose to do to reach the target.

I know how this kind of thing will bring out fighting, so I'm laying out rules and a goal. The goal is to learn from each other and give our opinions on the issues. The way we will do that is by posting our results, maybe adding comments about how you went about it, and then asking each other why we made the choices we did. What we will not do is criticise each others choices, not even in a productive way.

Good example:
>I see you chose to cut military personnel, do you feel that will hurt or position against our rivals? Do you feel it's worth the savings?

Bad example (please no do):
>wow, are you really going to cut spending to Medicare, are you heartless? How can you do such a thing!

And, once they tell you their rationale, that is it. This isn't a debate thread, there will be no arguing tolerated, even positive and good faith discussion is not for this thread. I just want to see what people come up with and hear about their values, even if I don't believe the same thing.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

What should be done to safeguard against potential global catastrophes that could end the existence of human civilization?  Things like a super-massive asteroid impact, global thermonuclear war, a Yellowstone super-volcano explosion, a natural or biotechnologically engineered super-plague, a self-replicating nanobot mishap, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/valley-girl-brain/201909/what-makes-people-so-gullible?utm_source=pocket-newtab

If people believe alt-right talking points or Nazi rhetoric, I wonder what other consequences this is having on their day-to-day lives.  Substantive examples are a plus for this thread.

According to studies done by psychologist Kevin Dutton, CEOs are the occupation with the highest percentage of psychopaths working them. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace#Careers_with_highest_proportion_of_psychopaths).

Is capitalism structured in such a way that it disproportionally rewards those with psychopathic and/or sociopathic tendencies? Is there a hypothetical economic system that does not, or is humanity always destined to have the worst people in the highest positions of power and influence?

Should we consider a person being romantically involved with a racist to be a tacit endorsement of racism?

Would you ever be romantically involved with a racist, if you yourself are not one?

The 18th Amendment granted Congress power to write legislation to enforce a prohibition of intoxicating liquors.  Should the Constitution be further amended to give Congress power to prohibit marijuana and other drugs?

So various threads are addressing the topic of racist or fascist views.  I've begun reading a book that's a bit controversial, one of the most controversial parts centers around discussion of this graph.

While various inequalities in systems enforced by the state are to be considered justice, since a state won't be involved in racism, I don't think measure of IQ has such official standing, so it may be discussed without disrespecting moral authority.

So, it this graph racist?

Is the IQ test racist or is racist to have created this chart -- to want to pull out such data for analysis?

If no, I guess that's it.  If yes, what must be done in correction?

Are current copyright terms too long?  How long should copyright last?

Imagine you were to discover, with certainty, that the world you are currenty living in is fake.  Everything in it, including all the people, were artificially created.  Whether what you're experiencing is a VR simulation or the dream of a sleeping god, this isn't the real world.  Further, as part of this discovery, you've figured out how to end it.  You'll return to the real world and everything about the fake world will cease to exist.

What do you do?  Stay in the fake world?  Or destroy the fake world to return to the real world?  Does your answer change if the world is particularly good or bad to live in?

(Continuing the conversation started at >>>/pony/987947 here in /townhall/ at moderator request.)

>>>/pony/987971
>the oldest trick in the nazi apologist book is to pit the onus on those reacting to the nazi and paint them as the real problem.
I'm not saying that Nazis are fine.  I think Naziism is a terrible ideology.  But two wrongs don't make a right.  And freedom of thought and speech is very important.  Just because people hold bad beliefs don't give anyone the right to physically attack them.  I'm honestly confused at how anyone could think otherwise.

I'm feeling very conflicted.

I like this creator, but some of the things they poke fun at in the video are things that sound similar to how my friends express themselves.

Can you guys please give me your honest and detailed opinion about both the video and what you think of genders and identity?