But you can’t ignore very real problems with increasing the pool of ignorant voters, since whoever has the most access to that pool will have an advantage because these ignorant voters can be taken advantage of simply because they are ignorant. Should people be voting if they don’t know how the system works or what the candidates even stand for? If you can’t be bothered to care about it enough to go through minimal requirements, do we need to go out of our way to shove a ballot in their hands?

And yes, I acknowledge that the kind of thinking I outlined above can be used to repress voters as well. I guess my point is that these policies cut both ways. It’s not such a clear cut answer as “give everyone a ballot”, because that can (and has) very very easily turn into “give them a ballot and suggest who they should vote for”.

ID and citizenship requirements seem like pretty basic requisites to voting, what’s wrong with those?

If you take credit for every good metric and blame all of the bad metrics on your predecessor, it makes me a little suspicious about the motives. They all do it, as long as I can remember.

Do you think the country is further to the right now than it was under Reagan?

Ok how about murder? Guy murders someone by hitting them when he is drunk. Rich guy with a good lawyer and connections in the community gets community service, but the poor, black man with a pot possession misdemeanor when he was 15 gets life in prison.

Unjust laws can and should be eliminated, but people using laws unjustly cannot. Speeding is a crime, but it is not perfectly enforced. Cops let family members go more often, good looking people, people they identify with, etc. Speeding is a just law that is not always enforced in a just way. This is always the case.

That may be so, but you can’t just get rid of laws because they could be used unjustly. All laws could be used unjustly.

Yeah I suppose it opens the door for investigations in case of miscarriage since some of the methods for abortion can be hard to tell apart from natural miscarriage. And yeah it could be abused or selectively enforced, and that’s the danger of any laws. We are always walking that line.

She got charged because she left the baby in the toilet, and even then they almost saved it. She was ultimately cleared of blame, but this story is nowhere near being representative of normal miscarriage. My cousin had a late term miscarriage, my mom had late miscarriage with twins, and two of my sister in laws did as well. None of those cases came even close to being treated as anything other than regular, normal (but sad) miscarriage. They had small funerals and buried or cremated the babies in each of those cases.

How many times has it happened? I would be astonished if it has happened even once without being very obviously abuse of some kind. Something like drinking heavily or doing drugs even though you know you are pregnant.

Also, what would be the motivation to do this? An excuse to lock women up in jail? This is one of the weirdest conspiracy theories that still somehow persists despite a complete lack of rationality.

How big is the risk of being jailed? Of all the women having miscarriages every single day, how many are being jailed? And for how many of those is there other circumstances? Do you think the end goal is to jail half of women? Seriously…

Miscarriages are insanely common, to the point where you are talking about jailing a majority of women. Do you actually believe that they want to do this? That’s like cartoon-villian level of evil and so extreme that it’s astonishing to me that people find this kind of hysteria so easy to believe. This place blows my mind sometimes with how much of an echo chamber it is.

I suppose the third type of person is a revolutionary, who wants to throw it away and start over. But then what, continue the cycle of revolution once the next generation arrives? Or is there an end point? Do you think it can actually be achieved? From a practical perspective, does human nature allow that?

I mostly agree with you about the bubbles. Getting outside your bubble is extremely important. It’s important that they get outside, but additionally it’s important for each of us to step outside our own bubble to make sure it isn’t happening to us. None of us is above that affect, and it’s instinctive to seek validation of our own preconceived notions. Trump has a propaganda machine working for him, but his opposition has an equally powerful machine working as well. Would you recognize it? Can you tell when it’s the machine and when it’s the truth? It’s pretty tough to separate out the noise, especially in a place like this that has an overwhelming sameness of opinion.

That’s just demagoguery. There’s a guy I know who thinks progressives hate America and everything they do is for the sole purpose of destroying it. It’s like that. I get that it’s far simpler to reduce your (political) enemies that way, but it’s lazy and uninteresting to me.

Not even to try to understand them so that you can address the root cause of why they like him? Or is the fact that they like him evidence of them being irredeemable and flawed humans? In that case, how should they be dealt with?

Thanks for actually answering the question! I would distill it down a little further though, and say that the difference between conservative and progressive is that progressives believe that human nature is malleable and that the system can be used to drive humanity in a positive direction. On the other hand, conservatives believe that human nature cannot be fundamentally changed and that attempts to do so will result in dystopia of some kind, or an overall decrease in happiness as humankind strays further from it’s nature. Obviously there are people within either of these camps who take things way too far. I don’t remember where I read this theory, but it’s the only one that has held up over the years and in various contexts.

If you have no interest in a discussion, you can just say that.

You literally made no effort to understand my comment.

I don’t believe in putting the worst possible spin and interpretation on one person or party and giving the other a complete pass. I was hoping for an objective assessment of conservatives motives and beliefs, but it was pretty much the same old “conservatives are racist”. Trying to distill it down to racism is ignorant at best, but is more likely just another opinion piece with an agenda. Is Trump tapping into nationalist tendencies? Well yeah, but that’s not what characterizes conservatives in general, and it’s not racist in and of itself. Nationalism isn’t necessarily racist (though it can be, and to some it is), specifically it’s pride in what the nation stands for and what is required to maintain the nation the way it is. Or at least the essence that makes the nation. Again, to some this has racism at its roots, but to most (in my experience), it’s about ideals and values that are irrelevant of race. What do you think are the core differences between progressives and conservatives? What is the true, fundamental difference in world view between one who is conservative and one who is progressive?