It's all so bleak. Where is the payoff?
It's all so bleak. Where is the payoff?
When you have a population age histogram that is flattening and eventually an upside down triangle, you need some way of extracting labor from the young and giving it to the old (the chosen ones who can afford it) to maintain the socioeconomic hierarchy.
The young without inheritances won’t ever have it as good, so you’ll need to distract them and otherwise fool them into believing it is their duty to transfer their earned income via earned income taxes to the elderly.
Old people vote. Old people vote in midterms and odd timed elections. Therefore, old people decide the candidates. Any politician would be smart to court them as a voting bloc.
As for the benefits for the wealthy; that's just the same old bullshit in a new protectionist wrapper. Get my friends and family as much benefit as I can while I have the ability sort of thing.
I think both are occurring. Young white men went GOP, why is that? Anti vaxx leftists went with Kennedy, why is that? Why do anti-immigration and pro-economics claim the top two republican policy slots, when they’re firmly opposed in their effects on the economy? This is the contradictory trend of delusion and cult of personality.
If the BBB just passed is an indication, I think overall we are more on the deluded side, most of these deluded non-rich white folks are more anti-immigrant than pro-economics.
Of course I do not believe GOP economic policies are better than the alternative, I’m not the one who voted for that policy regime however!
The Trump administration is deplorable, corrupt, grotesque and ridiculous in so many ways, not to mention dangerous, but seriously, get off it with these kinds of declarations. Such hyperbolic nonsense just shuts down genuine possible inroads into protesting against this government's uglier things and paints those who oppose it as hysterical lunatics.
Genocide has a real definition, and so too does chattel slavery. They're literal, specifically barbaric things whose definition only gets watered down by every random idiotic accusation of either happening because someone can't get a grip on their emotional outrages.
I see zero sign of Trump's government committing or even planning for genocide at the present time, and likewise for chattel slavery.
The deportations to third-party country are deportations, not mass slave sales.
Pro-economics? This admin can’t tell supply from demand. Anti-immigration, definitely.
Depending on how you define the Ten Stages of Genocide, we for sure have crossed the 3rd stage of genocide with all the state level anti trans bills and Trumps executive orders, and they’ve also engaged in stages 4 and 6. They’re not pressing on the brake, there’s a lead block on the gas pedal and they have repeatedly professed to wanting to erase us from public life. Trump released a campaign video about it in Feb/March of 2023.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
And then you can take your pick of media outlets. The Office Of Remigration is happening, they aren't hiding it. For example:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/29/politics/rubio-lays-out-detai...
This is just one clear-cut example of the administration prosecuting genocide. There are others, there's plenty of boogeymen.
Assuming you disagree that this is proof of genocide-in-progress, please explain to me how an official policy of ethnic cleansing is not prosecuting genocide. It will be illustrative.
In parting, a digestif, courtesy of the prominent far-right ideologue who's made public claims of a lurid sexual relationship with Trump:
https://xcancel.com/LauraLoomer/status/1939831588902109629#m
Really? Care to name an example of their being persecuted legally by the administration in the way you claim? For example, there were multiple huge gay pride parades in the U.S just recently, which are visibly and vocally attended by trans people too, and I didn't see federal agents or police of any kind going at them at any point.
The whole process of pregnancy/birth//breastfeeding/infant rearing sucks, so that most women will opt for 1 or 2, max.
Then you have to account for all the men and women who opt to stay single (or queer or whatever). The number of women that need to have more than 2 kids to offset those with 0 and 1 will never happen.
The only possible mechanism to align incentives is to remove all old age benefits and wealth transfers, so that one likely has to depend on their children. But even then, I doubt it would work.
I appreciate you looking for examples. This podcast episode will give you some, as well as a lens through which you may spot others.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-324-whats-goo...
https://www.genderjusticeleague.org/trans-non-binary-passpor...
Because Biden was much better at doing than talking about what was done, and in an absence of words any words dominate.
The Democratic party needs to stop looking at election results as mistakes by underinformed voters, and start looking at them as feedback on engagement.
Ethnic cleansing: "with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group"
"Mass killings" is a big detail which is hard to overlook. If we can't agree where ethnic cleansing includes mass killing it's hard too agree if ethnic cleansing is taking place.
Personally, ethnic cleansing to me sounds like Rwanda or Yugoslavia, which is not happening in the US yet.
Interesting, got any source for this claim ?
Whether current claims are overblown or not, I assume that it's what Trump 2 might do next that is a cause of concern for a lot of people. Between his mercurial behaviour, disregard for the rule of law, and some of the previously stated goals...
The situation is quite different of course, but one of the planned first "Jewish Solutions" by the Nazi regime was instead deporting them to... Madagascar. (A really weird alternative to consider to the current Israelo-Palestinian conflict, huh. Someone should perhaps write an alternative Man in a High Castle story about this...)
Things can turn very bad quite quickly when previous norms of behaviour go out of the window...
I think some also tried to push for the term 'ethnocide' for when mass killings were not involved ?
Hold on -- the regime recently welcomed refugees from Africa! If only we could understand why that group, versus the ones they're actively deporting. If only there was some pattern, a clue or hint as to what matters to them...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/12/trump-administratio...
Remember when Biden called the war in Ukraine a genocide? Didn't you think it watered down the word? If that's a genocide, does it mean we need a new word for holocaust-style genocides? Do we need to start saying things like "oh, yeah, this is a genocide alright, but not quite as much as the real ones in Rwanda and Germany". Is this really what we want to end up having to say?
That being said, prison labor combined with strong ethnic bias in the police force is very, very close to genuine slavery. What was this gross thing with the corrupt judge again. Kids For Cash? or something like this? Slavery.
I'm comfortable once we can agree that it's merely a question of degree and that we're indeed very solidly on the genocide spectrum.
I would like to believe Americans are capable of identifying genocide before we've gone full-Rwanda. I would like to hold my fellow Americans in higher esteem than that. I would like a pony.
No, it did not "water down the word." It is the stated position of Vladimir Putin that the Ukrainian people are indistinguishable from Russians, with no identity of their own. To that end, his forces have been kidnapping Ukrainian children and "repatriating" them to Russia since the invasion began.
Some homework for you:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/07/01/there-is-no-ukraine...
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/putin-still-steali...
or rather, its pretty well already here? thats the US government choosing to not raid farms if the farm owner will be the owner of the immigrants they hire.
the shipping people off to be tortured in south america might not be a sale of the person, but its awfully close, and i think youre overly focusing on the experience of the slave driver and not the enslaved person
https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...'
Care to read more than a sentence at a time?
I absolutely agree. Childcare is horribly expensive and just easing the burden of that would make parenting far more palatable to those who would otherwise be good parents.
Expecting other societies less egalitarian and less rich than them is pie in the sky thinking.
As this thread happening in a post about machinations by the current regime, the likelihood of it being solved (let alone correctly) borders on near impossible. The only thing that they'll do that will affect this is take away reproductive rights and that will lead to more unplanned births.
Solved meaning achieving replacement rate total fertility rate, not just people having the amount of kids they say they want.
In your statement, you erase trans people and redefined them as something else that fits your small worldview. That is in and of itself inherently anti-trans.
Someone being a trans woman does not make their participation in sports “male inclusion”. They are a woman if they transitioned to become a woman, and saying they are not and should be excluded because you said so is anti trans.