The fact that we ever allowed kids to scroll instead of paying attention in class is absurd.

I’ve never actually seen a classroom where this was the case. (aside from after work was completed, sort of as a reward for finishing their assignments on time) Most teachers will immediately tell students to put the phone away and will confiscate it if they keep trying to use it.

When they’re talking about phone bans, they’re usually meaning things like taking phones away at the front and returning them at the end of the day, or requiring students to leave them in lockers/locked pouches.

It’s not just party policies and their direct actions that their position in power influences though, correct?

The party in power also influences how individuals can make changes the government is unwilling to. For example, the Trump administration wants to revoke the nonprofit status of certain charities, especially those working on the climate, and social justice issues.

If Democrats were in power, this threat wouldn’t likely exist, and thus these nonprofits wouldn’t have to fear their funding being put in jeopardy. These nonprofits often do substantially more work than the government on many issues, and even though the party isn’t directly implementing policy that supports their goals, it likely wouldn’t do anything to actively hinder their goals directly. Whereas in this case, we’re seeing Trump pursue just that.

While yes, I do think that if you have a party that’s more sympathetic to your cause, no matter how little, you stand a much greater chance at changing the party’s policies overall, I also think you have to look at the wider picture of how their policy impacts the ability of other groups and individuals to make personal changes too.

We’re at the point where either Democrats need to be forced to radically change their platform, or the party needs to be destroyed so we can get at least one decent option.

I doubt destruction is a viable option, simply because a one-party system is somewhat an inevitability of how our voting system works if you allow the consolidation and persistence we’ve seen down to 2 parties continue into just 1. If we got to the point of only one party due to the Democrats being erased, I don’t believe it would pave the way for a better new party, I think it would just entrench the Republicans.

That said, I do think a radical change within the Democratic party is possible if enough people demand it, but the problem is that without the Democrats even having a proper seat in office, how are they supposed to even pass any policy, no matter how leftward they go on the political spectrum? And if the left continues fracturing and refusing to vote for them because “both sides are the same,” then all that happens is they keep shifting more and more right to try and capture Republican voters, which is exactly what they did this election, and many elections before it.

You don’t make the Democratic party platform more progressive by limiting the voters they can rely on to those increasingly more and more on the right. You do so by voting for them, getting them into power, then demanding change that the Republicans would never even consider allowing you to call for, let alone actually implement.

It’s not a guarantee, but at least it gives you a chance.

I get that. The problem for me is that this is a systemic issue, and it’s something that’s going to happen whether or not you as an individual participate, but it will impact your ability as an individual to fight for change.

We have a two-party duopoly. We have two bad choices. One is worse than the other, but neither will save us outright.

But if I’m going to do any kind of action to change that, I’m going to want the most favorable possible party in power. If you want to, say, fund more social programs, you’re going to watch Democrats possibly let you implement it, while Republicans will actively strip away what already exists the same day they get into office, then bar any new progress for the length of their term.

If you want to implement a system like ranked choice voting, you don’t want a wannabe dictator in power, because he’s obviously not going to make that as easy for you.

I don’t think the Democrats will actually save us in any way, nor do I think they’re currently pushing us in a very good direction overall, but the last thing I want is to increase the chance of someone like Trump staying in office by acting as though the Democrats are exactly equal, because all that will do is make any movement against right-wing policy extraordinarily difficult.

If I want to give myself the best odds of making a change, I want the people most sympathetic, even if only a little more than the alternative, to my cause, and right now, that’s the Democratic party, as unfortunate and depressing as that may be.

Okay, I’ll admit my analogy was a bit flawed. (Oh the joys of staying up much too late and arguing online) Here’s a better one:

One is driving off the edge while holding down the acceleration, screaming about how he wants to go faster. The other is holding down the acceleration less, screaming about how he thinks we should go slower but isn’t taking his foot off the gas.

If you had to try and convince one of them to stop, or if you wanted to buy yourself the most time before going off the edge, which would you pick?

Again, your only recourse is “Trump did it too”

I make an extraordinarily clear point that Trump is just doing the same type of thing, but substantially worse. I’m not saying “Trump did it too,” I’m saying “Trump did it even worse.” If I want to reduce the overall harm in a situation, I don’t get that by calling every option identical when some are less bad than others.

When it comes to migrants and foreigners, their policies are the same

I don’t recall Democrats deporting people to foreign countries like El Salvador without due process while also completely ending the legal asylum seeking processes in this country.

So… it’s okay because he was doing what Trump was doing, but a little less per migrant?

It seems like you missed the part where I explicitly said it wasn’t okay, and that it was simply less bad than what Trump is doing. Read my words instead of assuming my opinions.

It was Biden who pushed the doomsday clock closest to midnight than it’d been since the cuban missile crisis. It was Obama who ramped up the drone bombing campaign, it was Clinton who ordered Gaddafi killed, it was Biden who drafted the 90s crime bill that made the US the most incarcerated population in the entire world.

Just listing off the bad things Democrats have done without mentioning a single bad thing Trump has done in order to justify your moronic both sides argument is ridiculous.

I don’t know how many fucking times I’ll have to say this. The Democrats are obviously shitty, but that doesn’t mean that the substantially worse party is identical.

You can’t separate your own emotions against the Democrats from the reality that the Republicans are just the Democrats but even worse, so you resort to saying they’re both the same, then provide no sensible solutions other than “the world should be this way… somehow.”

If you want to do good shit in this world, don’t make it easier for the worst of the two parties to get in power by claiming they’re the same as the lesser evil.

If you have two people, one dropping 500 bombs on innocent people, and one dropping 1,000 bombs on innocent people, but both of them could have dropped more, and the one dropping 1,000 says he wants to drop 1,500, then if my goal is to stop the bombs being dropped on people, I don’t go “both sides are the same because they’re both bombing people,” I go “I should do my best to ensure that the one dropping 1,000 bombs is the least likely to stay in power so that I can attempt to convince the people only dropping 500 bombs to drop less.”

Does it mean that the one dropping 500 bombs is a good person? Of course fucking not. Does it mean I support them as an individual? Of course not. But if my goal is to stop people being bombed, I’m going to prefer the people already dropping the least bombs, because they’ll be the most easily convinced/forced to change.

I’m tired of arguing with people who don’t seem to be capable of understanding any level of fucking nuance, so I’ll be ending this conversation here. Feel free to argue to the void if you’d like.

More like driving off with your foot on the gas pedal vs driving off with your foot on the brake.

At least one option has a chance of stopping you from going off the cliff. The other just wants to guarantee you get thrown off the edge.

Biden held twice children at the border at one time than Trump at his highest

In your own source it very clearly outlines that it was not due to a more hostile border policy, but rather an increase in the number of people actually showing up at the border in the first place.

Meanwhile, Trump is not only keeping those people there, but also ending the refugee resettlement program, deporting people to El Salvador without due process, actively spreading misinformation about immigrants, and black-bagging American citizens, including native Americans.

Did Biden do some god awful things? Of course he fucking did. But what Trump is doing (and especially what he says he wants to do more of) is infinitely worse than what Biden did.

I can see that weapons and money to Israel skyrocketed under Biden.

And here’s the secretary of state chosen by Trump actively expediting 4 billion dollars of additional military assistance to Israel while directly mentioning the fact that it goes against the Biden admin’s partial arms embargo.

If you wanted to reduce the amount of aid being given to Israel, maybe start with the party that did something to limit the aid being given to a degree, instead of the one actively adding on even more while repealing the limits.

“Since taking office, the Trump Administration has approved nearly $12 billion in major FMS sales to Israel. This important decision coincides with President Trump’s repeal of a Biden-era memorandum which had imposed baseless and politicized conditions on military assistance to Israel at a time when our close ally was fighting a war of survival on multiple fronts against Iran and terror proxies.”

I can see that Obama alone prosecuted more whistleblowers than the US had prosecuted in its entire history.

Yep, that’s awful too. Too bad your own source also mentions that “six cases were tried during the presidency of Donald Trump between 2017 and 2021.” and guess what? Trump is now actively trying to fire the head of the agency that protects government whistleblowers.

If you can’t see the pattern of Republicans just being Democrats but substantially worse, then it’s no surprise you pull this “both sides are the same” argument.

Does anybody like the fact that the Democrats are just the watered down fascist party? Of course not. But if you’re going to try and better this fucking country, you don’t do that by saying “the fascists and the less fascist people are identical, actually” and then ruin your own chances of having a more sympathetic administration by easily allowing the fascists to trick people into thinking they’re just like the Democrats, and so more Democrat voters should feel okay with voting for them and their substantially worse policies.

I’ve said it before to so many people on this platform, and I’ll say it again: You do not increase your chances of enacting beneficial changes to this country when you support the larger evil, or act as though the larger evil and the lesser evil are identical. All you do is make it easier for the larger evil to gain power, no matter how much you personally advocate for better policies.

Both

And yet one of them does significantly more to ruin the planet than the other.

If you want the highest possible chance of changing the world for the better, you want a party in power that is the least bad of the options available to you. That doesn’t mean that party is good in itself, but it’s certainly the best chance you’ll get.

If you want to save the climate, for instance, the party that’s open to developing more clean energy, even if they still support fossil fuels in some capacity, is better than the one actively dismantling climate regulations, halting clean energy development, and increasing our fossil fuel production to an even higher rate.

Nobody likes this duopoly, but when you live under one, you have to pick the side that will do the least harm in order to implement your own goals to reduce harm further.

This doesn’t mean the Democrats are inherently good, but they’re certainly going to give you a better shot at improving the world than the neo-Nazis will.

let’s leave it there

Sure, I’ve now got nothing left to say.

If you can’t see the difference between a centrist party and a far-right fascist one, then I hold no hope for your political literacy going forward.

They are also doing that too.

It depends on the person in my experience.

For instance, I’ll often use a question format, but usually because I’m looking for similar results from a forum, in which I’d expect to find a post with a similar question as the title. This sometimes produces better results than just plain old keywords.

Other times though, I’m just throwing keywords out and adding "" to select the ones I require be included.

But I do know some people who only ever ask in question format no matter the actual query. (e.g. “What is 2+2” instead of just typing “2+2” and getting the calculator dialogue, like you said in your post too.)

Not exactly.

There’s still freefile (where private companies that offer tax prep software give away free access to people, usually within certain limits such as a maximum yearly income or complexity, such as only W2s, but not W2s and also investment income) but Direct File, which is where the IRS was essentially just making their own proper, standardized software to do what these private companies would, that would be entirely made for and offered by the government for free, is the thing being potentially shut down here.

The key to making this a lesser issue when it comes to keeping birth rates high is, in my opinion, a solid foundation of community trust and communal childcare.

The phrase “it takes a village” didn’t just spawn out of nowhere, after all. When communities can share the responsibilities of raising children, not only does it lead to a better quality of life for the kids because they tend to get more social interaction time in and better access to their community’s resources, but it also takes the burden off a lot of parents since it stops being a 24/7 job, and more of a shared, common duty to their community that is only sometimes needed, and is flexible in the case of them needing a break.

Of course, to get something like this, you need to fix the fact that we live in a very low trust society, and that is extremely difficult to do.

And now:

Trump clarifies some of the tariffs were actually 245% for some unknown reason

Is this phone also more secure?

Probably not.

Apple & Google have spent considerable amounts of time building out hardware security infrastructure for their products that I find it extremely unlikely Fairphone would have been able to match.

For example, the popular alternative Android OS GrapheneOS only supports Google Pixels, because: (Emphasis added by me)

“There are currently no other devices meeting even the most basic security requirements while running an alternate OS. GrapheneOS is very interested in supporting a non-Pixel brand, but the vast majority of Android OEMs do not take security seriously. Samsung takes security almost as seriously as Google, but they deliberately cripple their devices when unlock them to install another OS and don’t allow an alternate OS to use important security features. If Samsung permitted GrapheneOS to support their devices properly, many of their phones would be the closest to meeting our requirements. They’re currently missing the very important hardware memory tagging feature, but only because it’s such a new feature”

If even Samsung, the only other phone brand on the market they consider close to meeting their standards, doesn’t support every modern hardware security feature, and deliberately cripples their security for alternate OS’s, as a multi billion dollar company, I doubt Fairphone has custom-built hardware security mechanisms for their phones to the degree that Google has.

Not to mention the fact that the stronger IP law is, the more it’s often used to exploit people.

Oh, did you as an artist get given stronger rights for your work? That platform you’re posting on demands that you give them a license for any possible use, in exchange for posting your art there to get eyeballs on your work.

Did your patents just get stronger enforcement? Too bad it’s conveniently very difficult to fund and develop any product at scale under that patent without needing outside investor funding into a new corporate entity that will own the patent, instead of you!

To loosely paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: If someone wants a stronger lock, but won’t give you the key, then it’s not for your benefit.

If corporations get to put locks on everything with keys they own, but also make it hard for you to get or enforce access to the keys to the locks on your stuff, then the simplest way to level the playing field is to simply eliminate the locks.

Lego did a large behavioural study on this because this was their assumption, they thought they were doing completely gender-neutral stuff, but even controlling for parents’s biases their stuff wasn’t gender-neutral when it came to actually be interesting to kids.

Interesting. I can’t seem to find anything on this study, but maybe that’s just my search engine not providing very relevant results.

What is a relevant result is the study from just a few years ago that Lego also commissioned, which they’re using to justify making their product lines more gender neutral, after finding that:

“girls today feel increasingly confident to engage in all types of play and creative activities, but remain held back by society’s ingrained gender stereotypes” and that “Girls […] are more open towards different types of creative play compared to what their parents and society typically encourage.”

And they found a significant effect from parents pushing their kids into certain interests and hobbies influencing the behaviors of children:

Our insights further indicate that girls are typically encouraged into activities that are more cognitive, artistic and related to performance compared to boys who are more likely to be pushed into physical and STEM-like activities (digital, science, building, tools). Parents from this study are almost five times as likely to encourage girls over boys to engage in dance (81% vs. 19%) and dress-up (83% vs. 17%) activities, and over three times as likely to do the same for cooking/baking (80% vs. 20%). Adversely, they are almost four times as likely to encourage boys over girls to engage in program games (80% vs. 20%) and sports (76% vs. 24%) and over twice as likely to do the same when it comes to coding toys (71% vs. 29%)

And they even showed that kids felt pressured not to engage in cross-gendered play, even when they wanted to:

71% of boys vs. 42% of girls say they worry about being made fun of if they play with a toy typically associated for the other gender.

Now, a quick note on your other point.

If you say “there is no difference at all between men and women” you’re bound to essentialise everyone towards your own gender.

I don’t believe there is no difference at all between men and women. I simply believe that a lot of the things we say are inherent differences are actually not as inherent as people tend to believe.

For example, I’ve seen no evidence that women are inherently more kind/caring/empathetic than men in any biological way, only that society socializes them to be so, and thus we see that trend perpetuated over time. Yet if you ask most people, they’ll assume there’s something biological that makes women more like that emotionally.

I’ve seen no evidence that these kinds of traits are inherently biological.

Regardless of the fact that we have significant evidence that these more “new” forms of masculinity that incorporate less domineering and aggressive mannerisms are beneficial to men, I simply haven’t seen any evidence that these traits are biological.

In the same way that when you don’t socialize a child to prefer certain clothes or toys, (or stigmatize against them) they generally just go with what they prefer in the moment along lines that don’t match the gender binary, from what I’ve seen, the same is generally true for behaviors. We’re heavily influenced by our cultures and by extension, our upbringing, to a degree that explains why these mannerisms are commonly expressed along gendered lines.

Seconded. I genuinely understand most of the hate against AI, but I can’t understand how some people are so completely against any possible implementation.

Sometimes, an LLM is just good at rewording documentation to provide some extra context and examples. Sometimes it’s good for reformatting notes into bullet points, or asking about that one word you can’t put your finger on but generally remember some details about, but not enough for the thesaurus to find it.

Limited, sure, but not entirely useless. Of course, when my fucking charity fundraising platform starts adding features where you can speak to it and tell it “donate $x to x charity” instead of just clicking the buttons yourself, and that’s where the development budget is going… yeah, I’m not exactly happy about that.