A diesel engine can literally run on vegetable oil. We don’t need fossil fuel subsidies to keep farm tractors working.
If we must distort the market directly, we should do so on the demand side. Give farmers a per-Joule fuel subsidy, and let them use petro-disel, bio-disel, or electric as the market may provide.
Either we believe that markets work or we don’t
My other half had a very good experience with TalkSpace, which accepts our insurance.
Unless you’re in the Republican medicaid-obamacare gap, you should have insurance and they should have at least some mental health coverage. And if you are or they don’t, a professional stranger via an online service is definitely something you should look into.
Whether or not you’re “really” a real person, or a brain in a jar, or a butterfly dreaming you’re Zhuangzi, you and me and everyone else are still “people” we should respect.
Wrestling with the unfalsifiable nature of reality is something all thought traditions have dealt with, and I’d argue that you’re not really an adult in 2025 if you haven’t contemplated that all you know could be a hallucination.
The screwier question always becomes “if this is a dream , what if you’re not the dreamer?”
Not everything is a spectrum. You are either actually pregnant or not-pregnsnt. You’re either free to go when the officet is talking to you or you are being detained. You either had consent for sex or you didn’t.
For example, if the example you provide to bolster your argument is “Hitler had admirable qualities”, then you’ve jumped all the way past Godwin’s law and there’s no use talking to you.
“most people” are (1) a much smaller group that you think and (2) wrong.
If your behavior can at all be described as sexist, then you’re not a feminist. That includes both Feminism Appropriating Radical Transphobes like JK Rowling.and outright sex pests like Andrew Cuomo.
Of course I’m a feminist. It’s one of those sublime categories like “alive” or “pregnant” that has only two possible states.
"feminazi’ is kinda like calling a woman a “female”. Its use conveys a “I’m a sexist pig” message you do not seem to intend.
Better terms for women who believe that (cisgender) women are superior to men.
Some of these may covey other messages in their usage.
That’s a hell of a lot of words that aren’t either “of course we should vote in every election for the best possible candidate” or “no, we should withhold our votes in the general if the Dems don’t nominate someone sufficiently progressive.”
If you mean the latter, say it. If you don’t, then say that, too.
So, you are in favor of “my guy or the Nazi” voting? I didn’t hear a “no”, there.
It isn’t “loser talk” to recognize the rules that elections run by, or to push back against the “both sides” rhetoric that lets the Overton window drift ever rightward.
Either you show up and vote in every election for the least bad candidate, be they good or great or only “not as bad”, or you are doing more harm than good.
What does that fight look like, in your mind? Standing and shouting for Bernie and then sitting out the general when Clinton wins? Or arguing for Bernie in the primary since he’s the best choice and then arguing just as hard for Clinton in the general since she’s the best choice then?
Primary-only voting doesn’t force anyone to do anything but ignore us harder in the primary.
And if that isn’t what you mean by your objection to framing all elections as choices for “least bad”, then why are you echoing the rhetoric of those who do?
I don’t know how you square the circle of asserting that ‘both sided are bad’ is what got us here and still echoing “less bad” to buttress their thesis
Waiting for the left to be “good” instead of “less bad” is what makes “both sides are bad” such an effective demobilization tactic.
Picture the clearest example in human history, where one side was absolute villains and the other a superman-esque obvious good guy.
Then explain to me how the good guy is not the “least bad” choice.
Because too many of us who had selfish political actions, and for decades kept saying “both sides are bad” while the side nearest facism kept acting in bad faith.
Democratic elections have always in the end been about picking the least-bad option. And, like it or not, elections and their consequences shape the rest of the world.
Who I am and who did the study should be irrelevant. An idea should stand on its own or not.
Or do you really want to be the sort of person who dismissed Einstein as “Jewish science” or who told the Wright brothers that heavier than air flight is impossible? (Or, worse, the sort of person who pays for a scam “bomb sniffer” after a terrorist attack, or assumes Donald must be smart because he’s rich?)
It’s perfectly fine to answer a question with “I don’t know,” especially when your other option is “no, the emperor must have clothes on.”
Since you read it, and don’t reference them addressing the fact pattern I mentioned, I’m not sure reading it would be worth my time. I’d love to be convinced, however, if you can answer one question.
How did she categorize a movement as “non-violent” or not?
It shouldn’t be. Asserting that “no non-violent protests have failed” ignores an obvious null hypothesis.
Tyrannical regimes attack non-violent protests that get large enough, and then call said movements “violent” to justify what the state did to them.
There are no such things as unreconcilable contradictions.
*: and by “common” I mean “as I believe most Christians understand it.”. I’m sure some don’t, and that there’s at least one sect that would call me funny names for saying anything.
Common* christian theology posits that God is a perfect judge of law and fact, seeing as she has both infinite patience, infinite subjective time, and accurate knowledge of everyone’s points of view.
“Why does evil persist on Earth then” comes down to either said evil being necessary for some unseen purpose, said evil being irrelevant to God’s plans, or said evil being the consequence of some mortal privilege. Or some combination thereof.
There has been a lot of christian thought about why evil persists, and settling on an answer to it is essentially the base of all persistent ecumenical schisms. Other religions add even greater complexity, because once you examine perspectives off the abeahamic tree you quickly find that not even “Good” is consistently defined.
The moral and philosophical questions don’t get much easier if you remove God from the equation, or even if you adopt a nihilistic “only the momentary physical now matters” perspective.
If you don’t believe me, try coming up with an answer to “why is killing bad” that you can get agreement on. (Not just “is killing bad,” but an actual casual why.)
While you’re largely right, it is worth noting that each translation is a distinct work under copyright law, and any translation made after 1929 may be still protected.
And that ignores really young religions, and the copyright status of high-authority extant religions such as Iranian Islam, Mormon and Roman Catholic Christianity, Ron Hubbard’s Scientology or state-atheist communism.
(Whether or not Hubbard, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao count as “religious leaders” is a distinction without a difference in discussion of the copyright status of their works.)