General Politics Thread

Studies have confirmed that LGBT teens are more likely to be homeless than other teenagers, normally because their families make them homeless as punishment for being LGBT.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

That's fucked.

To pity someone is to tell them "I feel bad about being better than you."

Indeed it is. But is that a political issue or a social issue? And how could a law help in such a case? Forcing people to house someone they do not want to seems too draconian to me. I think instead there should be provision for shelter and financial aid for such people.

Are we talking about a specific country now, by the way?

Optimism is a duty.

No? It's absolutely relevant if you care about maximizing human welfare.

Even if gay people weren't disproportionately vulnerable to scarcity, which as Silas notes they are, any political program that doesn't try to help poor gay people is by definition worthless from a pro-gay perspective. Or a pro-poor perspective.

To be clear, I did not think for a second that Redmess is one of the people I'm criticizing.

"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn

It’s standard practise in all other instances. We don’t allow parents to make their kid homeless because they don’t like their gender or hair colour. Being LGBT shouldn’t be a free-pass to child abandonment that we wouldn’t let fly in any other instance.

The issue of LGBT teen homelessness is most prominent in the US compered to other developed nations, but it’s not special to the country.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

Though I agree that a parent shouldn't throw a kid out for being LGBT, that doesn't quite get to the root of the problem, since even if the parent didn't throw their kid out, it would still be a relationship deprived of love. And since we can't force that, the next best thing is to create a path for the kid to get to someone who will provide that necessary parental love.

SoundCloud

Re. LGBT being a risk factor for youth homelessness:

It's mainly a social issue (LGBT-phobia), not a political one. Neglecting one's own children is already a crime in most places I know of, but it doesn't help in these cases for the reason given above ^.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Feb 17th 2021 at 5:39:49 PM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

That seems like a distinction without a difference, the social is the political. Particularly when it comes to positions like LGBT rights.

"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn

That's actually a good idea; a program where people can adopt LGBT+ teens who were kicked out by their parents.

To pity someone is to tell them "I feel bad about being better than you."

Ah, I thought you meant adult children, in which case you'd be on shaky legal ground. In the case of minors, as said most countries already have laws against that sort of thing, but I agree that in such cases providing shelter and outside support would be better than forcing the family to continue housing them.

There you'd run into a more general problem though, namely that teens generally struggle with being adopted. Most parents looking to adopt children look for preteens or younger. For such a program to work, you'd need to solve the bigger problem of teen adoption as well.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 17th 2021 at 5:45:35 PM

Optimism is a duty.

(I think that the discussion of teen adoptions and the like would be better off in the LGBT threads or something parenting-related?)

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Agreed, I'm not quite sure why it showed up all of a sudden. Unless we want to keep discussing the general politics of it?

Optimism is a duty.

Relayed to this thread.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

That thread is very dead, though.

Optimism is a duty.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with that. Denying people's right to life, in order to pamper the feelings of "concerned" conservatives is not in any way, shape or form acceptable. Throwing the weak under the bus to protect the feelings of the strong is just a shitty position. Being against unrest is being more devoted to order than to justice. It is throwing out the wellbeing of the oppressed to preserve the power of the oppressors.

You're also basically just saying that the value of conservatism is the existence of conservatism. Humans are naturally inclined towards some xenophobia too. Doesn't give xenophobic parties any value. Just because it's natural doesn't give it any value.

Exactly what I meant with economic conservatism being just social conservatism with extra steps. You can't untangle the economic from the social like that. They always influence each other. Indirect discrimination is still discrimination. The world isn't already equal. Thus a hands-off approach is not going to make the world more equal. Taxing the rich less and giving the poor less (small government), is at best just perpetuating existing inequalities. At worst it's exacerbating them.

Between "conservative" progressives who would rather religious people just have their power effaced, but their basic rights preserved and provided with a grace period in which they can begrudgingly integrate with an increasingly secular society, and those who think the religious should just be mass killed or exiled outright along with their offspring to nip The Remnant in the bud, and any collateral damage being seen as a Necessary Evil, then even as an atheist I'm going to lean with the former path here, even if it might take slower to secularize society than just killing the problem population outright.

I don't think gradualism is inherently good, but situationally speaking the path of slower but steady progress that will be harder to roll back is frequently better than rapid change carried out by naive idealists who are unable to make it stick and through sloppiness may foment a rapid shift in the opposite direction and the backsliding of any progress they achieve.

Edited by AlleyOop on Feb 17th 2021 at 12:51:44 PM

It's a pretty egregious false equivalency to act as if the only options are mass killing or extremely slow incremental change.

Sometimes positive change can happen very quickly, denying that is a counterfactual conservative myth.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 17th 2021 at 9:51:55 AM

"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn

And I never said those were the only two options, or that reformism has to be slow as opposed to just slower than radicalism. Besides, even if I did it wouldn't entirely be strawmanning when many self-identified radicals themselves will claim that reformism is inherently bad because it's slower than the solutions they favor (which almost always come with some component of violence toward or active disenfranchising/abridgement of basic rights of groups deemed "ideologically risky").

Edited by AlleyOop on Feb 17th 2021 at 1:06:09 PM

While the mass-killing or brainwashing of all conservatives isn’t the only option is in an option that gets bought up fairly regularly here, so it’s one that it’s reasonable to refute.

"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran

I agree with that, but the question is, how fast can we force these changes to happen without causing too much resistance and chaos? Or do you feel any amount of chaos would justify implementing any amount of progressive legislation? Wouldn't that effectively amount to accelerationism?

Edited by Redmess on Feb 17th 2021 at 6:58:07 PM

Optimism is a duty.

Ok, but when you say "slow change is better than mass killing" that either implies 1) that those are the two options or 2) the former is better than the latter.

I assumed you meant #1 because #2 is supremely obvious, my apologies that I was wrong but I think it should be understandable as to why I assumed wrong.

By one person, and I'm not sure it's even that common.

"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn

I think the best way to progress as society is to do so swiftly when the opportunity arises, but more gradually otherwise. That way, you maximise the amount of progress you can achieve without causing a societal backlash.

Things like feminism weren't achieved in a day, or a decade, either. It required many steps over more than a century to get where we are now. It would have been politically and culturally impossible to have done all that all at once a century ago.

Optimism is a duty.

No, not any amount. If the chaos will likely hurt more innocent people in more ways than smaller change will, then it's not acceptable. But that's rarely if ever the case.

This isn't accelerationism. Accelerationism is inducing the chaos first and then hoping it magically turns out well.

I mean, societal backlash shouldn't be the main reason not to do the right thing. Insisting on steaming right ahead even if it means getting so much blood on your hands and sacrificing so much that winds up becoming a Pyrrhic victory, as opposed to a more strategically and logistically convenient path of action that combines efficiency with minimal resistance, would.

Even then, "rarely" is an exaggeration. We progressives could stage a coup to install supreme humanitarians as leaders of our nations who would've easily steamrolled into Sudan to end the Darfur genocide, or point nukes at China to end the Uyghur concentration camps, or pour every spare resource into green energy and trying to solve climate change right now if we wanted to. And it might work, for a time, without necessarily hurting a ton of people.

But it wouldn't last, and you bet things would go back to normal as soon as our backs were turned, because radical/militant action rarely sticks by its lonesome. You need some degree of organic, homegrown popular support for such actions, and while education and proselytization can speed it up, unless you forcibly eliminate those who disagree (even if it's by waiting for all the resistant old folk to die of natural causes, or abolishing/invalidate their ability to vote beforehand), that aspect by its very nature trends towards at least some degree of gradualism.

That to me is the real rate-limiting step of progress that people have to recognize, and probably what some people like Redmess mean when they talk about the benefits of a conservative approach to progress. Do I wish it didn't have to be so? Yes. But not at least taking heed of this would risk engaging in actively unethical actions.

Edited by AlleyOop on Feb 17th 2021 at 1:51:07 PM

Not to mention that such humanitarian benevolence could go horribly wrong. I don't think even the Uyghurs would appreciate risking a nuclear war to save their backs. They live where the nukes would fall, after all.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 17th 2021 at 7:17:10 PM

Optimism is a duty.