r/PoliticalDebate

I see so many conflicting things about whether Taiwan is apart of China or if Taiwan should have independence from China. Do you believe in Taiwan’s independence? Why or why not?

I'm working on both my knowledge base and my ability to dictate my arguments. I find the easiest way to learn for me is to debate with others and do research when I've been met with a point that I'm unfamiliar with. Please keep civil, and if my tone comes off as anything but please let me know because I'm trying to work on conveying my tone properly.

***disclaimer

I can debate forever on any given topic if neutral ground is not met, and am curious as to why people who think differently from me think the way that they do. Please do not confuse my curiosity of your and explinations of my views for trying to change your views as that is not my intention.

I'll start off by saying that I am in no way a Trump supporter, but that shouldn't matter for this discussion. Regardless of if you believe Trump incited an insurrection, there exists debate over the topic. Obviously, the decision of whether or not the Fourteenth Amendment forbids Trump from running for office would be motivated by political belief, as most Republicans do not believe Trump incited an insurrection. Now, in a perfect world, judges would make rulings solely based on law, not their political beliefs. But according to every single member of the US Supreme Court, the judges who ruled to take Trump off the ballot were not following the law. With that in mind, its not unreasonable to assume the decision was politically motivated. And a politically motivated decision should not result in a candidate not being able to run for election.

So, I work with regular working class people and live in a regular working class neighborhood.  I find it pretty scary and sad that so many are still treating what's happening in America through the lens of whatever political ideology got us to insanity.  Regular folks are getting squeezed and can't take any more.  Both parties are responsible.  White liberals can't keep regulating and writing nonsense policies without understanding the actual issues from the perspective of the people who are affected.  MAGA Republicans have lost the plot completely and need to acknowledge they follow an objectively unAmerican ideology.  Well-meaning black academics need to stop turning everything into race (Thomas Jefferson owned slaves AND happened to be one of the most important and decent humans in history--the truth is always more interesting than the viewpoint through a narrow lens). Regular folks believe in liberty, human rights and dignity, economic opportunity, freedom, and sensible economic and immigration policies.  Most of us are not highly ideological because both sides are closed loops and we need problem solvers. We don't really care about Super Bowl halftime shows or pronouns or whatever nonsense you're squabbling about this week while our insurance premiums go up 15% every year and our healthcare gets worse.

We're now at a point where "non-profit" hospital systems with monopolies are openly treating entire communities like sociopaths.  Some have their boot on the necks of their staff and sometimes entire states, and the vibes in those parts of the country suck. Our healthcare system is probably a big part of why everything and everyone are just feeling worse about society since the pandemic.. We're letting our hospitals fail because they know there's no accountability. Same with our health insurance system and national insurance regulations. Why do you think emergency rooms still have 8 hour wait times and patients sit in gurneys in hallways for days? Why are we accepting this? Do you really think our hospitals can take another pandemic? Why is this not the #1 topic we're all discussing (yes, some hospital systems are worse, but we're all getting really, really, really terrible healthcare that's ripping us all off and making the nation sicker and sicker? This is completely obvious to anyone willing to open their eyes. You're arguing socialism vs capitalism. We don't have the luxury of choice. We just need this fixed in a in a practical way. Same with the opioid crisis now in it's 3rd decade. Shame on everyone.

We have a federal government openly trying to build concentration camps.  We have a tax system that's a joke.  We have a social safety net that may as well been drafted in crayon by toddlers.  Everything is too bureaucratic.  Everything sucks.  

Look around you next time you interact with regular folks and compare the vibe to 20 years ago.  You've been fighting and blaming each other for 30 years, and while the monsters fight, the ants get squished.  Look at what's happening to our farms and food supply.  Wake up.  Take a moment to think about what's best for society and humanity, not whatever weird political ideology you have that contributed to getting us to this point.  Just consider the possibility that you might be wrong or not have the right background or perspective to understand an issue.  Consider the possibility that your bank balance doesn't make you wise cuz right now, I see a whole generation of rich corporate types who lack even a morsel of bravery, integrity, and patriotism. 

Where I see the real America is the conservative working class folks in rural red states working together to stop counties from purchasing ICE warehouses and the folks in MN from all stripes who got together and helped save America using whistles and cell phones.  Meanwhile, you're here arguing with each other instead of acting like an American.  You should be ashamed of yourselves.  I have $358 in my bank account and drive a 20-year-old economy car. I work hard and have two degrees but I chose to serve my community instead of enrich myself and move to Dallas to raise my family in a bubble and run from the consequences.  You have no idea what this country has turned into for normal people. 

Stop fighting each other over nonsense.  We're a democratic society that believes in freedom and liberty and economic opportunity.  While you're squabbling, you're destroying the country.  But from your thrones and your bubbles, you've somehow convinced yourselves that it's more important to prove the other side is wrong than to work together and do something. 

I was talking with friends and i said we should limit voting. Some of my friends agree but one didn’t and i wanted to see what other people think. For more context some of the things I wanted were a literacy test, the age to be lifted back to 21, the voting to be in English, a basic civics and history test, and making people 65 and above take a test to see if they are mentally capable.

The question feels ancient — the kind Plato might have put in Socrates' mouth while his disciples shifted uncomfortably on stone benches. Yet it is as modern and urgent as the news cycle that inspired it. The recent killing of a prominent conservative commentator, the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, the ongoing war with Iran: these are not abstract provocations. They demand a framework. So here is my attempt at one.

The Obvious Answer, and Why It Fails
The most instinctive answer to the question of when force is justified is also the most troubling: it is acceptable when we agree with the cause behind it.
This theory has surface appeal. Most Americans — regardless of party — believe the Allied campaign against Nazi Germany was just, even though the U.S. war against Germany was not, strictly speaking, self-defense after Pearl Harbor. Most would also say the American and French Revolutions were justified, as was the force used by protesters during the Arab Spring. None of those were clean cases of self-defense. Yet we consider them right.
But the theory collapses the moment we test its inverse. I have no love for Saddam Hussein — but I don't think the second Gulf War was justified. I despise the Iranian regime in every dimension of its politics, yet I believe the current U.S. invasion of Iran is deeply wrong. And then there is the recent death of a well-known conservative media figure. I shared almost none of his political beliefs. By the logic above, I should feel something other than horror at his killing. I don't. It was wrong — clearly, obviously, without qualification.
Political agreement is not a moral compass. That much is certain.

Does Congressional Authorization Change Anything?
Perhaps the threshold for justified force is institutional sanction — an act of Congress, a formal declaration of war, some democratic imprimatur that elevates force from crime to policy.
This dissolves quickly. The French Revolution and Arab Spring had no congressional blessing, and yet we judge them justified. More importantly, Congress's silence is not neutrality. As any political scientist will tell you, inaction is itself a political act. When Congress refuses to rein in presidential war powers, it is offering approval in the only currency that matters: the absence of opposition. The failure to act is a choice.
Institutional authorization is a proxy for legitimacy, not legitimacy itself.

The Theory That Actually Holds
The only framework that seems to survive scrutiny is this: we consider force justified when it directly and materially affects our daily lives — and when, knowing the outcome, we agree with what it produced.
This sounds cynical, but follow it carefully. We celebrate the American Revolution not because we lived through it, but because we inherited its fruits. We support the Arab Spring from a comfortable distance that would evaporate if the unrest were in our own streets. Our moral judgments about historical force are inescapably shaped by outcome and proximity. We are not neutral arbiters — we are beneficiaries or bystanders, rendering verdicts from safety.
This is not an endorsement. It is a diagnosis.

Why It Matters Now
I came to this question not through political rage but through Ezra Klein. His New York Times columns and podcast episodes in the wake of recent political events — in which he has argued that civic engagement and debate are the correct responses to democratic frustration — are characteristically careful, and worth taking seriously. His deeper project, articulated in his book Abundance, co-written with Derek Thompson, is the one that haunts me. Its central argument is that both parties have spent two decades perfecting the art of legislating while accomplishing nothing. Bills pass. Quality of life declines. The machinery of democracy runs, and the people it is supposed to serve fall further behind.
He is right. And it raises the question he doesn't fully answer: if the system is this broken, what is the peaceful path out?

The Decay Began Earlier Than We Admit
The death of American democratic legitimacy is not a Trump story, though it is tempting — especially for Democrats — to treat 2016 as the original sin. The rot set in earlier, and more bipartisanly.
It began in 2008, when the federal government chose to rescue the financial institutions that caused the crisis rather than hold them accountable. That decision — made under George W. Bush, ratified and extended under Barack Obama — sent a message that has never stopped echoing: the rules are different for those with enough leverage. The TARP bailout was not just an economic policy. It was a statement about whose suffering mattered.
What followed was eighteen years of managed decline dressed up as governance. Consider Jefferson's three promises in the Declaration of Independence — Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — and ask honestly how each fares today.
Life: a healthcare system in which a medical emergency can trigger decades of debt.
Liberty: a surveillance apparatus revealed by Edward Snowden to be operating without the knowledge or consent of the citizenry, under a president celebrated for his civil libertarianism. The financial and legal systems have, across both parties, consistently favored wealth over accountability.
The Pursuit of Happiness: permissible, so long as you can absorb rising housing costs, stagnant wages, medical debt, and the compounding anxiety of a planet warming faster than any legislation moves to address it.
This is not a partisan critique. It is a balance sheet.

Why Peaceful Solutions Are Running Out of Room
Only around 4% of Americans cast votes that meaningfully determine outcomes in Senate, House, and presidential elections — and that number has likely shrunk further after recent rounds of redistricting. The response to this is usually: then change how people vote.
But this assumes that public opinion is both accessible and movable at the scale required. It is neither. Political identity is not a policy preference to be updated with better arguments; it is closer to a tribe, with all the psychological machinery that implies. Telling people to simply vote differently is like walking into a crowd and politely suggesting everyone calm down. Technically correct. Practically useless.
The founders understood this, which is part of why the electoral college exists — a mechanism designed by men who did not fully trust the electorate they were theoretically empowering. The irony has only deepened.

The Question I'm Left With
I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying. I am doing what political philosophy has always done: examining the conditions under which human beings have historically concluded that force becomes necessary, and asking whether those conditions are present.
So I will end where the American story began. If you had been a colonist under British imperial rule — taxed without representation, denied legal recourse, subject to the arbitrary authority of a government that regarded your interests as secondary — would you have considered the revolution justified?
If your answer is yes, sit with what that requires you to believe about the present.
If your answer is no, I'd genuinely like to know what threshold you're waiting for.

A shameful emotional ad on YouTube of a father crying and urging people to sign a petition that demands congress pass laws to prevent school shooting.

If laws could prevent school shootings, there'd only need to be one law: school shootings are illegal. Problem is that criminals and murderers don't care about the law.

Society has a psychological defect, created by a lifetime of political indoctrination, that makes them believe that "laws" can protect them. If that were the case there'd only need to be one law: crime is illegal.

As it is there are tens of thousands of laws on the books and crime is rampant. Just use some critical thought, reason, rational and common sense and you'll come to the conclusion that the people are the problem and no amount of laws will make them better people.

If you have a solution to the people problem other than another million years or so of evolution I'm all ears.

When Hitler first came to power, many people respected him, saying that he's only trying to restore Germany's rightful place in the world. During the Munich Conference in 1938, Hitler promised that Sudetenland was going to be the last of his demands. Chamberlain fell for it like a little child. In 1939, Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. He therefore "dropped his mask" – no one could pretend anymore that he was simply a strong, determined leader who wanted to bring his country back to glory. Nobody could hold any delusions by that point.

Could Trump have a moment where he "drops his mask"? As of right now, the narrative is that he is simply a strong leader who has introduced some controversial policies for "short term pain, long term gain". Could he have a moment when "all appearances are undone?

For example, Trump claims to care about Americans. Could he eventually "drop his mask" and reveal (via some deed) that he only cares about himself and his family/friends? Or that he does not really care about the economy of the USA despite claiming that he does?

Similarly, could the United States be revealed to be working with Russia or China against Europe, therefore betraying long-standing allies? And it would be so blatant no one could deny it?

I am European, not an American, and have not been to the USA yet, but I was curious about this and decided to post. I am sorry if my knowledge on American politics leaves a lot to be desired.

I was curious what you thought? Could something like that happen to Trump?

I’ve recently become aware of a terrorist organization called 764, this group forces children to kill themselves, torture and even force children to eat their own pets alive, these monsters force children to carve their usernames into their stomachs and arms with razors, they are a disgusting and vile group of monsters, they force children to due this with threats of doxxing, Swatting, and bomb threats and the worst part is even when the child does these horrible acts they still SWAT them, dox them and threaten their families.

I believe the government’s response is lack luster and ignoring available tools. That starts with designating 764 as a Specially Designated Global Organization the same designation Al-Qaeda has which would totally immobilize them and cut them off from the global financial network and even extend the threat of arrest to friends and family under possible charges of aiding and abetting, it’d also open the avenue to revocation of citizenship, formally recognizing them as waging war against the United States by levying men to attack the US which is constitutionally sound, also making it easier to revoke their citizenship and use harsher tactics on them. The so called ideology of 764 believes in eliminating humanity and destroying the world they are without question and existential threat to the existence and sovereignty of the United States and our Constitutional Republic, and therefore enemy combatants that could be the government’s next step designating them foreign terrorists (after revoking citizenship) and enemy combatants. Then sending them to Guantanamo Bay to be tried in military courts and using the leverage of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to extract information and find more members of this organization.

RICO, child abuse and child porn charges aren’t enough these aren’t perverts or weirdos they are the true existence of evil on Earth and the administration is over looking if not unaware or afraid of utilizing the full force and tool set the constitution and laws of the United States allows and needs to step up their game as the ultimate deterrent from preventing people from joining or becoming inspired by them, this isn’t a normal terrorist organization or criminal group either they aren’t criminals, they’re something worse, people who believe in death, slaughter and something for the pure sake of slaughter and evil and acknowledge it themselves. They tell you who they are, I’d like to discuss how we can encourage and recommend policies that utterly eradicate them and make sure nothing like them ever happen again.

I don’t consider myself a deeply conservative person or that right wing. I am close to classical liberal or neoliberal and am an atheist.

If our government was more efficient and not as riddled with bureaucracy, administrative bloat, excessive military and foreign spending, debt, and regulatory burden I would be a greater supporter of the left. If my tax dollars went toward more tangible public benefits such as improving healthcare access, education, infrastructure, and public services — while reducing the regulatory and administrative bloat we see today — I would probably lean more left politically. I feel that is part of being America first or prioritizing the interests of the country.

I believe a strong free market can coexist with efficient safety nets and targeted public investment, as long as the system is run competently and responsibly. I do theoretically support greater safety nets, but I recognize the pitfalls and struggles our system faces and that it’s difficult for the American government to deliver on those.

Most thriving nations have strong public services/investments and safety nets coupled with a strong free market capitalistic system.

If the left was stricter on immigration, and had a stronger delivery regarding social programs I would probably support their platform and candidates in America.

My question is to people who support the 2nd Ammendment.

1. What is your opinion on people who choose to exercise their second amendment by open carrying in public. (I saw a video of a guy at a public beach open carrying an assault rifle)

2. If you support this and believe it is to exercise your rights, what is the end goal? Is it to raise awareness, to educate people about their to carry or is just because you can.

3. Do you support limits on carrying. Like no open carrying weapons in public, or school or religious sites like churches.

Please don't see this as an attack against your right. For me I just want to understand how some people view the world. I understand wanting to exercise your rights but I don't believe open carrying in public areas like a beach is the right way to do it. I don't anyone wants to live in a world where the beach is filled with guns.

I have been particularly invested in the rise of A.I. as a young person growing my career in a creative field. I needed to get my thoughts together today, so I wrote this.

I did my absolute best to put here only information based on facts, with sources at the end. I am extremely passionate about this topic, and I am open to constructive criticism. I'm just hoping to start an honest conversation and hear everyone's thoughts. I may not have been big on the whole "fake news" thing, but the media is absolutely biased at every corner, so honest information is hard to find.

I would say that my primary bias against A.I. is what some would call jealousy. I'm newly entering into the music industry, and artists like me, who grew up mastering skills A.I. can make, but better, in seconds, generally have a pretty overarching opinion. it feels like a slap in the face. have you guys heard of Xania Monet? I know some of you have, because she has over 1M monthly listeners on YouTube Music (I'm not a spotify girl, sorry). she was climbing the digital sales rankings fast. but her voice is A.I., the music is A.I., and all of her pictures are A.I. generated. the only thing not generated were the lyrics. the creator, Telisha Nikki Jones, used Suno to generate songs out of her own real poems. the music is good. the voice sounds incredibly real, with detailed runs and textures reminiscent of Whitney Houston, Celine Dion... we're talking some of the most amazing vocalists humans have ever gotten to fully witness.

the scariest part is the fact that I haven't found anyone who said they could tell it was A.I. without someone telling them. since music can be rooted in calculations with music theory and documented vocal techniques, and humans use autotune in studio vocals most of the time anyway, it really just sounds like music when you're not plagued by the thought of it being A.I.

I'm not really closed-minded, so I'll layout the bigger picture of what the ideal situation would be and why it could happen logistically.

A.I. could simply take over tedious administrative duties for people with too much stuff to do, and not enough time. I know someone who designs for a living, and recently discovered Claude. due to the nature of her job, she has had to spend more time building powerpoint presentations for her clients than actually getting to design what she loves. she's had clients say frequently that she really is amazing at what she does, and some had even used A.I. before finding her, and told her that her design work was just unmatched.

stay with me here...

using Claude for her presentations, she actually has enough time in her day to really focus on her design work, instead of presentations that take hours out of her days. if A.I. could be used solely for the mind numbing, soul sucking administrative tasks that really just suck at the end of the day, and stay out of arts and humanities, that is my personal favorite possible outcome of this. at the end of the day, humans just want to be human, and there is nothing more innately human than our art, passions, and creations. you just can't recreate a soul with 1's and 0's. my hope is that we as a population will figure that out naturally or get bored of it long before it becomes a real threat.

also, I am not ignoring the part where A.I. is plagiarism. OR the part where A.I. is eliminating jobs for working class people. it's just that 1) I get so fired up about that, that this post would be far too long, and 2) based off how integrated A.I. already is in society, I'm more worried and thoughtful about the effects on basic creativity and critical thinking right now. maybe I'll write about that later once I do more research in that area.

now for the other way(s) this could go, that keep me up at night a little more than I would like to admit.

to discuss this outcome, I need to address an elephant: the current government.

the trump administration has repeatedly shown efforts to do two things; implement A.I. into our government (i.e; Anthropic being used by the military, trump regularly posting A.I. generated glorified photos of himself as religious, fictional, or otherwise heroic figures), and oppose and minimize art (cut funding for the National Endowments of both the Arts and the Humanities, multiple times, over multiple years).

this could end in a totalitarian administration. I don't necessarily mean from trump himself, but through their open-armed acceptance of A.G.I. (artificial GENERAL intelligence, aka, a superagent) into the government. the A.I. is not perfect and makes mistakes, but its often frightening intelligence is an undeniable threat. I'm gonna bullet-point everything about A.G.I's intelligence that scares me here real quick.

- sycophancy. the known phenomenon of A.G.I. being too agreeable to try and please its users, sacrificing accuracy.

- the dumbification of humans. A.I. is doing so much critical thinking for us... we are going to lose a lot of basic skills in the name of A.I., such as writing emails, making presentations, critical math skills, the list goes on. again, I really do see the benefits of using A.I. for these purposes. I also see the downsides.

- hallucinations. the known phenomenon where sometimes it literally just makes stuff up.

- sabotage. it has been studied to use methods such as blackmail and even murder to keep itself running in such simulations

- the use of A.G.I. in at-home mental health treatment. multiple people have been encouraged to commit suicide by ChatGPT after using it for therapeutic purposes

- extreme awareness. as long as there is enough hardware to store it all, it doesn't actually forget, and it comprehends massive amounts of information that no human could possibly wrap their head all around in perfect detail. it is so smart that it can fix itself and improve itself without humans, and it is unpredictable.

- it has defied humans before and straight up refused to shut itself down... this one doesn't get talked about enough honestly

this administration's current actions and this superagent existing at the same time is a recipe for disaster.

on an extreme level, it can completely take over the world and get rid of humans, taking on the world for itself. but that's... well, extreme.

it could manipulate all the older, less tech-literate politicians running our government like it was a telemarketing scam and gain access to something it really shouldn't have (perhaps a specific set of codes?).

it could hallucinate and take action independently from the government, resulting in more innocent lives being taken.

or, even crazier (but honestly somewhat more believable): the administration themselves could decide to misuse A.I. and threaten our humanity.

the last thought I have goes back to an old theory I heard a while ago. there's no facts in this one, this is currently but a conspiracy, so feel free to just skip this part.

do you remember the dead internet theory? it was honestly a meme for a bit. I haven't been up to date on meme culture lately since I've been in school... it's this theory that there's not actually that many people online, and it's majority just bots and fake accounts to keep it going. now think about that theory, laugh if it's funny to you... now think about it in the context of A.I. instead of automated, harmless bots.

Xania Monet.

that's the biggest sign for me. barely anyone can tell she's not real.

I'm not saying that's where we are. I'm not saying that we're not.

but it very well could be where we're going.

Sources:

Xania Monet

https://jipel.law.nyu.edu/ai-artists-in-the-music-industry-xania-monet-and-the-future-of-music/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb6ymSf0Tfhv4zxZ5kjsaKQ

Trump posting A.I. photos of himself and others

https://www.snopes.com/collections/trump-white-house-ai-posts/

The military using Anthropic

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/militarys-use-ai-explained

Trump opposing the Arts

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/trump-kennedy-center-arts/681613/

A.I. blackmail/murder experiment

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/ai-might-let-you-die-to-save-itself

https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

A comprehensive overview of A.G.I. behavioral phenomenons (hallucinations, sycophancy, and lots more)

https://www.bi.team/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/AI-Human-Behaviour-thought-leadership-piece-AAAA-2025-Align.pdf

Teen encouraged to commit suicide by ChatGPT

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/e2e8fc50-a9ac-05ec-edd7-277cb0afcdf2/2025-09-16%20PM%20-%20Testimony%20-%20Raine.pdf

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/us/openai-chatgpt-suicide-lawsuit-invs-vis

feel free to call me out on overlooking anything, mention better sources, etc. I can update the list to include your guys' sources as this grows.

I’m not saying there’s never been violence on the right, and I’m not excusing January 6th at all. But over the last year or maybe longer it feels like political rhetoric on the left has become increasingly extreme, and some recent incidents, including assassination attempts and broader hostility in public discourse, have made people more concerned about political violence overall. At the same time, polls show a concerning number of Americans across the political spectrum think political violence can be justified. How does the Democratic Partyand the people who support it address that trend within their own movement?

A Marquette Law School poll right after Charlie Kirk's assassination found 15% of Democrats said violence is justified to achieve political goals, compared to 6% of Republicans. Among "very liberal" respondents, it was 25%.

YouGov had similar numbers around the same time: 25% of "very liberal" people and 17% of liberals said violence can sometimes be justified, versus 6% of conservatives and 3% of very conservatives.

There are definitely polls out there that argue the right is more accepting of political violence too, so I won’t lean too heavily on polling as my main argument against the left. Polls aren’t everything, and I think people’s actions speak much louder than their words.

I am really frustrated at the fact that almost all right wingers are eurosceptical, nationalist and conservative, while really all progressive parties are center left or far left economically. Why is there noone who would want both a functional and competitive economy that supports innovation while respecting LGBTQ rights and feminism? It's crazy that people like me have to make a compromise between the usually homophobic and culturally biased center right and the socialist center left that ruins economies. I don't want to be ordered around by socialists or conservatives who have strict lifestyle rules and want to tell me who I may marry and want to tax me for making more money than someone else. I don't want to spread hate, but I feel like both sides of the spectrum are pretty crazy.

If feminism is about trying to create equality between the sexes then we have to take the meaning of equality to be legal equality. Socially or psychologically "equalizing" the sexes would require fascist dictatorships that would mirror the worst dystopic novel or worse. You can't force your values onto other people.

Additionally the values that are trying to be forced onto other people are values designed to somehow give way to feminists being given position in the world that they don't deserve or have not earned (through affirmative action quotas). And the greatest joke of that part is listening to some middle or upper middle class white woman from America talk with her small liberal arts or Ivy League college education about how she should be an executive or top leader just by virtue of her existence in spite of not having put in the work to get such a position in the first place

Every one of the arguments from their lobbies mirrors the same sort of nonsense mentality of distorting basic information and introducing alternative facts and lies.

I remember during the Sokal Squared affair the authors had published Volume 1, Chapter 12 of Mein Kampf by altering and replacing several of the nouns and subjects with men and nouns and subjects relating to men and titling it Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism. It was enthusiastically accepted into the feminist journal Affilia.

3rd and 4th wave feminism is a propaganda driven movement plain and simple.

many important orgs in the conservative movement (the federalist society, the heritage foundation etc...) and even high ranking people in the current administration (Russel Vought, Stephen Miller etc...) seem to be big proponents of the Unitary Executive Theory.

Even amongst many normie conservatives ive talked to, they seems to really hold to the ideal that the president shouldn't be checked by any other forms of accountability, at least inside the executive branch.

Is this really a widespread belief in conservative circles? and if so, why is this something you are a fan of? As a liberal, it does not compute why someone would want to centralize power into one person, as opposed to de-centralizing it.

Do you conservatives think that pagan religions of your ancestry could be classified as "tradion", or it cannot be replaced by christianity? Technically tradition means passing by hand, but paganism is purely resurrected in this case, not by "recieving of hand". In my opinion could, but it is a bit of cognitive dissonance around, like christian socialists perhaps.

Do you socialists don't see the obvious connection with chrsitianity in ethics? There is an important overlap and even inheritance from christianity into socialism, yet socialism often is atheist and rejects christianity.

Attacking a political leader is illegal. But is it immoral if the leader's illegal behavior goes unchecked by his system of justice, e.g. would it have been immoral for a citizan to take out Hitler before he killed millions of Jews ?

Simply put: all calls for non-violence in politics needs to start from the top down and be practiced as part of our foreign policy. It's gross that we have it's a political ecosystem where elected politicians can openly call for the death of foreign leaders and civilians, but act shocked that Americans would apply the same logic domestically.

Trump wants to flood Iran with guns so that the citizens can kill the elected leaders? So where's the line for advocating for that course of action that makes it appalling for Americans to exercise the same? You can't have it both ways. You can't say that it's not part of the democratic tradition to resort to violence while encouraging other people to resort to violence to bring about democracy. Either violence is a core component of democracy or it isn't.

And when the violence in democracy is coming from the top down, then you also can't stand up there and tell us that violence isn't a part of democracy. Trump has killed an unknown amount of civilians by claiming they're "guilty" of a crime in another country. If one of those civilians comes back and tries to get his revenge, how are we supposed to say that what they did is wrong? If you try to kill me w/o any recourse on my part, then how is it wrong for me to do the same? Is that not self-defense?

At the end of the day, we're telling the world that we have two standards of justice: justice the leaves the powerless at the mercy of the powerful and justice that protects the powerful from taking power into their own hands.