Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Wait can we circle back from this conversation of the kind that occasionally happens and invariably goes nowhere and talk briefly about the extremely wrong assertion a couple pages back that the economy exists (or should exist) to serve people (contrasted with existing for people to serve it?) Because neither of those things are true, the economy exists as an emergent property of trade.
It doesn't exist "for" anything any more than water does. It can be guided (with a lot of difficulty and sometimes things go extremely wrong and thousands die, much like water), but the economy is a phenomenon, not an institution, and acting like the economy is an institution is an excellent way to fail at achieving things using it or to more generally misunderstand why things happen and how they happen.
yea but they have a good point, that this kind of teleological thinking can make things more confusing instead of clarifying, and make it more difficult to determine what can actually be done about it. For example, thinking of the economy as being designed leads to people thinking of it as having designers, which leads to ideas like "if we force the people in charge to design a good economy instead, it will work by default!"
Honestly, I don't get how Fighteer is getting from "everyone should have as many kids as their financial situation, capabilities and desires call for, and we should ensure that everyone has the financial stability and access to sex education to make that choice" to "people shouldn't have kids," unless he's making an unusually bizarre argument from the categorical imperative. Antinatalism is an extremely minority position, and I say that as something of a Child Hater.
Yea, just think about how weird coinage is from the perspective of a peasant from those times.
You cant eat it, you cant wear it, the only reason it has any value is that the people in charge say this shiny disk has value and that the other side of your bargaining has to honor it.
It's something we can apreciate now, being able to more easily store and transport wealth, but to them that value was abstract.
And in cases like Japan where rice was easy to handle the long term storage of, it took multiple attempts from the goverment trying to force coinage to make it stick.
Thankfully there pretty likley to fail since most of them hate the goverment and its power, ignoring that it is exactly a goverments power that lets currency work.
The dollar has value because the US goverment says it does, and they have the force of economy... and well literal force to make sure you honor it.
A random collection of people cant really enact change on there own.
This reminds me that Andrew Jackson tried to kill paper money and banks in general.
"The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me but I will kill it."
Of all things, Aqua Teen Hunger Force made note of this in a gag (the context is that using a cloning machine to counterfeit one dollar bills created a clone of George Washington made out of said bills protesting their counterfeiting):
- Frylock: Man, we should have cloned twenties. Jackson wouldn't have given a shit.
Whenever the topic of people not wanting to have kids comes up, what I tend to think Fighteer is referring to, (though please correct me if I'm wrong of course) is that the broad progressive left doesn't really have much positive messaging when it comes to having children.
What I mean by this is that while we have loads of media depicting, for example, found families and adoption and whatnot as explicitly noble, kind, acts that should be celebrated, we don't really do much of that when depicting having children. At best it feels like it's neutral. It's something you do if you want to do it. But we don't put the same kind of optical value on it as we do on say, the found family trope. Which makes sense, having children is seen as both the default and those other forms of family units haven't gotten as much exposure to a wider audience.
I think the argument is that we eventually need our own version of the nuclear family ideal. A depiction of a healthy family unit that is desirable (and hopefully realistically attainable) and embodies our values.
Edited by GNinja on Nov 28th 2023 at 2:09:55 PM
Kaze ni Nare!The problem is that progressive ideals are pretty poorly suited for that kind of model "this is what a family should look like" idea. The conservative nuclear family has strong visual messaging and decades of constructed propaganda behind it; a vision of a progressive family could be Steven Universe with its queer coparents, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with Miles's working mom, maybe even the multi-generational family from Encanto. (I just now realized all of these are from Western animation.)
My point is that progressive ideals about family generally say that a family can be almost anything and look almost any way. That doesn't lend itself well to mythologizing like the nuclear family - and most of the healthiest ways to raise kids, including multi-generational homes, are just not economically plausible now.
It's been fun.Yeah, it turns out the nuclear family arrangement has a lot of downsides and it's pretty damn isolating for most people involved in one. And the progressive messaging really is "a family can be basically anything", especially since it has to include queer couples.
The right ends up in this weird spot where they fucking love adoption as a concept but loathe the idea of queer adoption or adoption by people not in their group, so they throw up a ton of barriers.
Being neutral on children is kind of the best approach, because that shifts it to "if you want to have a kid, it's your choice" and not BREED DAMMIT. It's very, very difficult to actively message that people should have kids and to not be really nasty towards non-"traditional" families in the process, so a lot of left-wing people don't bother trying to thread that useless needle.
Considering the progressive left is all about choice, it would be pretty hypocritical to try to push some kind of family ideals on people.
Not to mention that for plenty of people on the left (particularly among LGBTQ+ people), the concept of birth family hasn't been super friendly to them.
Edited by Resileafs on Nov 28th 2023 at 9:46:36 AM

![[up] [up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png)
"FAFO"?
The damned queen and the relentless knight.