Truly important albums have a deep and lasting impact on music moving forward.
Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992) was the best rap album of the decade.
You can't blame people for something that only exists in their subconscious.
Police have a duty to protect and serve all people under their jurisdiction.
Anyone American with the means who prioritizes their safety should emigrate to another country
Donald Trump is an authoritarian that threatens the freedom of Americans.
It is the responsibility of the police to earn public trust.
Only at the most elite levels of sport, does trans participation warrant any regulation.
Elite sports can govern themselves without the government stepping in.
Merriam-Webster's definition of a sandwich is broad enough to include a hot dog.
A meatball sub is accepted as a sandwich, and a hot dog shares its structure.
Restaurants should be free to list hot dogs in the sandwich section.
Anything that wraps a filling in bread should count as a sandwich.
Sandwich taxes and labeling rules should apply to hot dogs equally.
A hot dog is a filling enclosed by bread, which is the basic definition of a sandwich.
Agitate lacks a way for users to flag or report low-quality or spam arguments at scale.
Agitate lacks clear onboarding that explains its unique argument-mapping logic to first-time users.
Agitate currently lacks robust moderation tools to prevent bad-faith argument mapping.
Agitate lacks mobile-friendly or accessible interface options for everyday users.
A discourse map is only as clear as the quality of argument phrasing used to build it.
A discourse map is only useful if it covers the full range of positions, not just popular ones.
A map of discourse is only useful if enough real people are putting real arguments into it.
Agitate could suppress minority viewpoints if majority votes consistently bury dissenting arguments.
Agitate could entrench existing power asymmetries if well-organized groups game the argument graph.
Agitate could help faith communities organize and articulate shared values in civic debates.
Agitate gives a voice to communities like mine that mainstream media and politicians ignore.
A first-time visitor needs to know if Agitate is free to use.
A first-time visitor needs to know if Agitate requires an account or any setup before participating.
Voter support for ST3 was largely contingent on Ballard getting Link Light Rail.
Sound Transit was approved by WA voters as a regional transit system - not just Seattle.
WA residents outside of Seattle are paying for Sound Transit through a mic of taxes and fees.
ST3 should prioritize building a station and transit service to the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle.
Seattle needs to build out its light rail system - sound transit.
Without competition, private owners optimize for extraction, not service quality.
Water and land infrastructure should default to public or community ownership
No profession is ethically required to accept death as a routine cost of doing their job.
Officers who discount their own safety make worse real-time decisions, increasing harm to everyone.
Reasonable self-preservation and genuine public safety are not in conflict — they are complementary.
Profit-driven innovation in EVs is a market achievement, not climate leadership.
Publicly aligning with climate skeptics undermines any claim to climate champion status.
Selling premium electric vehicles to wealthy buyers is a market achievement, not climate leadership.
Profit-driven innovation does not make someone a climate hero.
Building companies in clean tech sectors does not mean climate change was the actual mission.
Elected local sheriffs should decide their own equipment needs, not outside policy pressure.
Commercializing premium EVs for wealthy buyers is a market achievement, not climate leadership.
Profit-driven innovation is not the same as intentional climate advocacy.
Accelerating one product category doesn't offset political alignment with fossil fuel interests.
Profit-driven innovation is not the same as climate leadership.
Commercializing EVs is a market achievement, not environmental heroism.
Musk's climate impact is a byproduct of business ambition, not a defining mission.
Selling expensive electric cars to wealthy buyers is a business achievement, not a climate crusade.
A person's character and motives matter when deciding whether they deserve to be held up as a hero.
The founder of Agitate is not a particularly talented software developer.
Claude Code greatly expands novice programmers' ability to produce useful software features.
Crowd-sourced argument mapping tools are nothing new, many have tried and failed.
Privatization of public goods leads to higher consumer costs and lower quality.
Private enterprise faces a higher cost of capital putting it at a disadvantage to governments.
Government is often staffed by incredibly smart, hard-working and practical people.
Graham Platner should be supported for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat.
Being shamed by your community is a long standing form of social cohesion - keeping people in line.
Shaming people is fine, the question is what is actually shameful.
Police unions protecting incumbents make them naturally biased toward the past.
Nostalgia for the past tends to favor racists modes of thinking.
The police union is like any other, protecting its members employment.
We need to empower a new independent media to fill the role of legacy media.
US media is not designed to deal with an authoritarian party.
A total lack of shame is a super power to avoid media accountability.
Donald Trump has some minor talents that happen to be extraordinarily effective.
You can be born with XX chromosomes AND XY chromosomes (chimerism).
Girls sports is about girls having the opportunity to enjoy sport.
The Hormuz Straight Energy Crisis will have no conclusion until Donald Trump accepts total defeat.
Trump has surrounded himself through his cabinet and beyond with unqualified idiots as advisors.
Much of what Pete Hegseth dismisses as "Woke" is vital to a strong and healthy military.
The Trump Administration made no plan to protect the Straight of Hormuz prior starting the war.
The War in Iran was a war of choice for the United States and Israel
Trump thinks constantly about how he scam us out of more money.
Vaccine mandates have been common throughout history as sensible public health initiative.
The social contract requires all participants to surrender some of their freedoms.
Much of the violence experienced at BLM protests was from far-right infiltrators and agitators.
Humane treatment of Palestinians does not require Israelis to enjoy any less safety.
Homosexuality has been observed among many different animal species.
When you want to categorize a broad swath of items, it is best to create a taxonomy for it.
Humans come in only two varieties: XX for female and XY for male.
Trans and non-binary may also suffer from body dysmorphia but they distinct condtions.
Transit planners seek solutions to keep costs per passenger-mile low.
The second amendment doesn't allow individuals to own an atom bomb.
There must be a limit to the amount of firepower a private citizen can possess.
I need to better understand what Codename:Vindaloo attempts to do in general
Private investment in human spaceflight produces benefits for broader society.
Private space exploration has succeeded in areas where government programs gave up.
The creation of wealth through risk-taking and innovation should be celebrated as natural.
The original U.S. Constitution included the three-fifths clause.
CRT is a theory and therefore should only be included in advanced courses.
Black patients receive measurably worse healthcare than the average American patient.
Critical race theory does not redefine racism; it examines the legal structures that racism built.
Hamas's own governing documents commit it to the armed destruction of Israel.
Hamas aims to liberate Palestine from the Israeli occupation.
There are some things Hamas does that are worth encouraging.
Hamas's founding charter calls for an Islamic state from the river to the sea.
Hamas uses civilian infrastructure as cover for its military operations, by its own doctrine.
Any authority that can, should call for a ceasefire in Israel
The way Palestinians are treated by Israelis should not be tolerated.
Hamas is irredeemably bad as a designated terrorist organization with a genocidal charter.
Believing one racial group is inherently superior or inferior is a moral failure.
The First Amendment protects the right of people to live by their religious convictions.
Support for Israel as a U.S. ally and Middle East democracy does not constitute antisemitism.
Jewish identity and the state of Israel exist independent of one another.
Criticizing Israeli government policy is legitimate political debate, not antisemitism.
Conflating Jewish identity with Israeli state politics is not good for Jews.
Jewish identity and the state of Israel are intrinsically connected for most Jews.
The historical persecution of Jewish people justifies the necessity of a Jewish homeland.
The separation of church and state as a principle should be universal.
Governments and their people should embrace shifts toward a more pluralistic society.
Israel is exclusionary toward other religions and ethnicities.
Israeli policies toward Palestinians amount to ethnic cleansing.
Israel has the right to exist as the historical and legal homeland of the Jewish people.
Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas's rocket attacks and atrocities.
Israel has sought to undermine good faith efforts by the Palestinians to work toward peace.
Palestinians who want peace are harmed by Hamas's wars rather than helped.
Hamas is a designated terrorist organization responsible for the October 7th massacre.
The Israeli subjugation of Palestinians is a clear example of apartheid.
Trans children need access to peers and shared social settings with their same gender identity.
Youth sports are primarily about teamwork and belonging, not elite competition.
Shorter focused work hours often produce more than longer hours with diminishing returns.
Hunter-gatherer societies historically worked roughly twenty to twenty-two hours per week.
The ideal amount of work for humans anthropologically is 18-25 hours per week.
People should not be expected to work to excess at the cost of the rest of their lives.
Capitalism has both produced real prosperity and caused genuine destruction.
Capitalism depends on a price system to coordinate the allocation of resources and services.
Genuine competition among producers benefits society by driving innovation and lowering prices.
Hundreds of death row exonerations since 1973 should restrict capital punishment to ironclad cases.
Socialism concentrates economic and political power in the same hands and produces corruption.
Cuba remains the most prominent functioning example of a socialist state today.
Scandinavians describe their systems as social democratic market economies rather than socialist.
Commitment to Capitalism is the best defense against Socialism.
Socialism would offer no escape from your working conditions.
Every implementation of socialism at scale has failed to deliver its stated goals.
Socialism is defined by collective ownership of the means of production.
Anonymity online strips away the social consequences that normally moderate cruelty.
Nextdoor's crime threads weaponize proximity and anxiety into racial surveillance.
I refrain from participating when Michael Jackson is played in social settings.
I no longer listen to Michael Jackson's music because of what I know about him.
Just-cause employment law is the actual structural protection against cancellation excesses.
Even positive movements can be diminished by tactical excesses of their supporters.
Car infrastructure consumes thirty to fifty percent of urban land in most American cities.
Walkable commercial districts perform better economically than car-oriented ones.
Parking minimums encourage car ownership by subsidizing parking infrastructure through rents.
Parking minimums do not relieve on-street parking shortages.
If you don’t give residents a place to park then parking for everyone will be a nightmare.
"Stay woke" originated in Black communities as a survival concept.
The term "woke" has been stretched by bad-faith critics to mean whatever they want to attack.
Being aware of how systems of oppression operate is not inherently wrong.
Woke ideology is being imposed on every American institution without the people's consent.
Decision-makers whose wealth is tied to home equity will not enact policy that reduces home prices.
Concentrating population in cities is more efficient per capita than dispersing it across suburbs.
Modern building codes add real safety, but some requirements have become excessive and raise costs.
Communities have a legitimate voice in development decisions without holding unlimited veto power.
Cities should permit as much new development as the market is willing to build.
Upzoning requires only a change to the zoning map and the political will to implement it.
"Neighborhood character" objections to new buildings usually amount to opposition to more residents.
Liberal cities should use their local power to deliver affordable housing.
Golf courses occupy prime real estate while excluding most of the general public.
Multiple tee boxes create meaningfully different challenges from the same hole.
Golf's core skills can be developed and tested on a fraction of a traditional course's acreage.
Golf courses consume urban land that could otherwise house thousands or serve as public parks.
More police funding does not reduce crime; investing in education, mental health, and housing does.
Transit policy should make car ownership optional rather than necessary.
No new highways should be built and existing highways should not be expanded.
Musk's stated Mars colonization plan involves colonists working off debt to SpaceX.
Single-occupancy vehicle tunnels cannot match the capacity-to-investment ratio of mass transit.
Public promotion of cryptocurrency tends to do net harm to inexperienced investors.
On net, Elon Musk's harms outweigh his contributions to EV adoption.
Elon Musk created a one-hundred-million-dollar prize for atmospheric carbon removal.
A substantial shift toward mass transit is essential to addressing climate change.
Electrifying personal vehicles alone is far from sufficient to address climate change.
Elon Musk's vision of the future is bleaker than its enthusiasts admit.
Elon Musk should be exalted as a key innovator in the fight to combat climate change.
Electrification of energy use, replacing combustion across all sectors, is the path forward.
Hyper-critical posts on social media generate substantially higher engagement than neutral ones.
Many herbal supplements are sold through multi-level marketing structures.
The First Amendment protects offensive speech but does not protect deliberate fraud or defamation.
Facebook should ban deceptive herbal supplement advertising from its platform.
Protecting citizens from consumer fraud is a core government responsibility.
Herbal remedies that prove effective in clinical trials become regulated pharmaceuticals.
Most herbal remedies are ineffective; those that work have become accepted medicine.
Most advertising for herbal remedies should be illegal due to unfounded health claims.
Online partisan communities radicalize through self-reinforcing feedback loops.
Political conversations on social media run more hostile than equivalent conversations in person.
Every transformative technology follows the same cycle of hype, crash, and stabilization.
Whiteness was never a culture; it was a boundary drawn to decide who belongs.
A culture that dominates every major global institution does not face a meaningful threat.
American culture's celebration of diversity remains aspirational rather than practiced.
Investment in cryptocurrency is fundamentally driven by speculation rather than productive use.
Precious metals carry intrinsic value through their industrial uses.
Mining precious metals causes less environmental harm than mining cryptocurrency.
The American war in Afghanistan is militarily unwinnable in any meaningful sense.
The Taliban have been steadily gaining territory in Afghanistan even with U.S. forces present.
America’s toppling of the Taliban did facilitate genuine advances for Afghan women.
Choosing 9/11 to withdraw troops from Afghanistan is a perverse symbolic date to choose.
The US has a moral obligation to the people of Afghanistan to provide a stable and secure country.
The American war in Afghanistan should be ended as soon as feasible.
Evil is that which a society cannot accommodate without losing itself.
A forever war is a normalized indefinite military commitment without a defined end.
Active wars should be reviewed and reauthorized by Congress at regular intervals.
Republicans operate with party discipline while Democrats struggle to set aside ideology to act.
The Republican base has been deliberately cultivated through decades of partisan media.
Donald Trump should be rejected as a man, as a president, and as a precedent.
Republicans have been deliberately sowing racial division for electoral gain since Nixon.
Donald Trump understood the Republican base better than mainstream Republicans did.
The Tea Party's working-class outrage laid the groundwork for Trumpism.
Donald Trump has demonstrated mastery of practical politics across extraordinary obstacles.
The Pacific Northwest functions as a single interconnected ecosystem.
A proportionally representative U.S. Senate would reliably be controlled by Democrats.
Donald Trump lost the 2020 popular vote by more than seven million votes.
Democrats have won seven of the past nine popular votes in U.S. presidential elections.
Donald Trump lost the 2016 popular vote by approximately three million votes.
Democrats have won six of the previous eight presidential popular votes.
The current Supreme Court reflects accumulated appointments across eight presidential terms.
A Supreme Court reflecting the country's vote totals over recent decades would lean liberal.
The Judiciary Act of 2021 expanding the court by 4 seats should be passed.
Lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court should be replaced with staggered fixed terms.
Rushing through a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg damaged the court.
The nomination of Merrick Garland being blocked by Republicans damaged the court.
Politically driven court restructuring would erode the trust the public places in the Supreme Court.
President Biden commissioned a bipartisan study on potential structural reform of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court must avoid any appearance of political partisanship to retain its authority.
Trust in court impartiality is essential to the maintenance of civic order.
Courts should be fair and impartial in their application of the law.
The definition of the ideal government must come before any effort to build it.
Many Old Testament stories directly contradict the teachings of Jesus.
The Bible condones rape, incest, slavery, mutilation and murder.
The Bible is bullshit. Any meaningful message is coincidental.
Scripture commands a wife to submit to her husband under his accountability to God.
A household where one adult defers to the other by gender is a hierarchy rather than a partnership.
Conservative policy positions on women's issues constitute structural misogyny.
The traditional American family structure placed women in legal and economic dependence on men.
Comedy requires the freedom to cross lines, including downward.
Using a platform to mock people with less power is bullying with a punchline.
Erasing trans people from school curricula causes real harm to trans children.
State legislators have no proper role in the exam room with trans children and their doctors.
Medical decisions about gender identity belong to the patient and their family.
Being transgender or non-binary is not a mental disorder by any current clinical standard.
A plan's secrecy becomes harder to maintain as it grows in scale, duration, and complexity.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence as the minimum standard for accepting them.
A federal vaccine mandate is an unconstitutional infringement on bodily autonomy.
Insisting on ideological purity from those willing to help undermines movements that want results.
Vaccination mandates in the United States have 170 years of upheld legal precedent.
Police officers deserve proper resources, equipment, and respect for the risks they bear.
The safety of police officers should be the first consideration in evaluating any policing policy.
Mandating de-escalation by law is how a policing culture that resists change gets changed.
Private businesses have the right to mandate proof of vaccination to protect customers and staff.
COVID-19 is a permanent feature of the respiratory disease landscape.
COVID-19 is no longer the unknown pathogen it was in 2020 and policy should reflect that.
COVID-19 is now endemic; continued emergency-level response is no longer warranted.
COVID-19 met every clinical and epidemiological definition of a pandemic.
A line must be drawn between personal freedom and the common welfare in the use of identification.
The use of credentials and IDs constrains personal freedom to some degree.
Vaccine passports create a two-tier society and should be banned at every level.
No one should be required to take a vaccine as a condition of ordinary daily life.
Texas banned vaccine passports while posting some of the country's highest COVID-19 death rates.
There will be no federal mandate requiring Americans to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
No federal database tracking COVID-19 vaccinations was created.
The federal government under Biden declined to create a national vaccine passport system.
The government is trying to use COVID-19 vaccines to control people.
The Biden administration supported private-sector vaccine verification, not a federal mandate.
A unique human life begins at conception and deserves the protection of the law.
Jesus is the only Son of God, the incarnation of the Father.
Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of those who confess Him.
Not every opinion deserves equal weight; pretending otherwise is intellectual cowardice.
Reducing flight frequency is one of the highest-impact individual carbon choices available.
Colorado leads in voter turnout because it makes voting easy.
Moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta cost businesses in a majority-Black city.
Georgia's SB 202 was passed on the false premise that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Georgia's election laws balance reasonable access with serious integrity protections.
Colorado does not have voting lines because it administers voting well.
Colorado's mail-in voting system is a model other states should adopt.
Corporate public statements on issues they fund the opposite of are textbook virtue signaling.
There are many Blue states with voting laws more strict than Georgia after SB 202
Major League Baseball has a complicated history with Black players that calls for active reckoning.
Corporations withholding business from states with regressive laws is effective leverage.
Georgia's SB 202 permits the state legislature to override local election officials.
Georgia's SB 202 ID requirements fall hardest on the elderly, the poor, and people of color.
Acknowledging that Georgia's SB 202 expanded some early voting does not excuse its worst provisions.
Georgia's SB 202 is reasonable policy for protecting election integrity.
Corporations ultimately serve shareholders, not the cause of social justice.
Delta Airlines contributed heavily to the legislators behind Georgia's election law SB 202.
Major League Baseball was right to move the 2021 All-Star Game out of Georgia.
Delta Airlines' public opposition to SB 202 was the right use of its platform.
Coca-Cola's public opposition to Georgia's SB 202 was the right use of corporate platform.
Mass transit ridership should be encouraged through good service and reasonable fares.
Free parking is not a public entitlement; the cost falls on someone else.
Parking minimums force buildings to include more parking than the market would provide.
Children should be taught the full history of white supremacy in this country.
Racism is dismantled by changing the laws and policies that produce unequal outcomes.
White supremacy creates structural headwinds for the achievement of people of color.
Benefiting from racial privilege is not the same as actively perpetuating racism.
Continuous attempts to protect against every possible unknown produce paranoia rather than safety.
Every girl, including trans girls, deserves the same opportunity to participate in sports.
Women's athletics exists to provide a competitive space separated from male physiology.
Laws restricting trans athletes from women's sports are popular and defensible.
A slippery-slope argument is generally speculative without intermediate evidence.
Policy should prevent the eventual pitfalls of “slippery slopes”, not the slopes themselves.
Trans inclusion in elite women's sports would eventually erode women's athletics.
The arrival of effective vaccines justified resuming normal life.
Full vaccination substantially reduces COVID-19 transmission.
Vaccinated adults are dramatically less likely to carry and spread COVID-19.
All authorized COVID-19 vaccines are safe and highly effective.
Victims of police killings are held to an impossible standard of perfect calm and compliance.
Public discourse readily accepts a police officer's fear as justification for excessive force.
Discussion of Black lives mattering should not be deflected to other groups.
BLM asks the country to live up to the value that all lives, including Black ones, matter.
The phrase "Black Lives Matter" is best understood with an implied "too."
"Black Lives Matter" asks the country to stop letting Black lives matter less.
All lives matter equally; that is the premise of a just society.
Unsolved crimes against Black victims reflect structural failure, not random distribution.
When violent crimes go unsolved, perpetrators are emboldened.
Black Americans' fear of police is calibrated to a documented reality.
Black Lives Matter exists to ensure Black Americans can live without fear of the state.
A policy ask should be proportional to the measurable result it produces.
Separate is not equal, including in how migrant children are treated.
Compassion must extend to American workers whose wages compete with undocumented labor.
Any food serving a purely ornamental purpose qualifies as a garnish.
Garnishes serve only to enhance the visual appearance of a dish.
Condiments are designed to be consumed alongside a food in a complementary manner.
Peperoncini should be classified as either a garnish or a condiment, not both.
Adam Smith himself wrote that a society whose majority is poor and miserable cannot be flourishing.
Capitalism has genuinely raised living standards for hundreds of millions of people.
Every decade of delay on climate action multiplies the eventual cost of addressing it.
The opportunity to avoid the worst immediate climate impacts has already been squandered.
Current emission trajectories point to 3 to 4 degrees of warming by 2100.
More environmental damage has been done knowingly in recent decades than was ever done in ignorance.
More CO2 has been emitted since the 1992 UN climate framework than in all prior human history.
The tools for measuring genuine public sentiment need improvement.
Genuinely representing all stakeholders in a forum would take more time than any meeting allows.
Robert's Rules of Order are excellent at managing meeting time and ensuring participation.
Robert's Rules manage process effectively but do not build consensus on substance.
Robert's Rules of Order are imperfect but the most tested system for managing deliberative groups.
Large or contentious groups require formal process to function at all.
Each added participant in a discussion multiplies the possible misunderstandings.
Even intimate one-on-one conversations frequently produce misunderstandings.
Political labels carry the speaker's associations more than they describe the labeled person.
Useful arguments require shared definitions of the terms in dispute.
An ideal economy should distribute the downside of economic risk as well as the upside.
Corporate charters are public grants and should carry public stakes and oversight.
An ideal economy would not allow any single entity to accumulate disproportionate economic power.
A decent society should set a floor of material conditions below which no one is allowed to fall.
The ideal economic system is fundamentally capitalist in its organizing principles.
The rate of current warming is unprecedented in the geological record.
Current global temperature shifts fall within the historical range of natural variation.
Earth's climate has fluctuated throughout its 4.5-billion-year history without human industry.
Defining the ideal economic system honestly is where useful economic argument has to start.
The government should commit whatever resources are necessary to end homelessness.
Public spending on poverty produces measurable economic returns, not just moral ones.
Healthcare, education, housing, and infrastructure are public investments with documented returns.
Meritocracy does not exist in pure form but remains worth pursuing as an ideal.
Representation initiatives should target groups with documented evidence of structural disadvantage.
Colleges should be required to admit rural and urban students in proportion to a state's population.
Hong Kong and Taipei demonstrate that high density can be highly livable when planned well.
Rural upbringings often shelter children from the complexity they will eventually have to navigate.
Parks, greenways, and plazas are essential to making density livable.
Most of Seattle's single-family zoning should be upzoned to allow gentle density.
Single-family zoning is the primary legal instrument behind the housing shortage.
The denser a city, the better it fulfills the core functions of urban life.
Media optimizes for outrage because angry readers stay longer and generate more ad revenue.
Disapproving of unauthorized immigration does not require dehumanizing the people who cross.
The Trump administration's legislative legacy consists of a tax cut and a renamed trade deal.
Dignity should be sought for American workers, migrants, and border communities alike.
The 2021 border apprehension numbers were lower than those of 2019 under the Trump administration.
The 2021 migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border was the predictable consequence of relaxed policy.
People who cross the border have due process rights regardless of how one feels about them.
Genuine compassion at the border means preventing dangerous crossings that lead to deaths.
Migrants illegally crossing the border should be treated as a threat to American sovereignty.
Every sovereign nation has the right to defend its territory from aggression.
As a vocal supporter of the Israel Defense Forces, Gal Gadot deserve scrutiny for her support.
One can hold one's identity without dismissing what that identity has meant for others.
Being white is fine; refusing to recognize what it has historically meant in this country is not.
Choosing an Israeli actress to play Wonder Woman alienates Palestinians.
It is perfectly fine to be white, and saying so should not be controversial.
Blade (1998) was the first major Marvel theatrical release and helped enable the modern MCU.
Meteor Man (1993) was the first Black superhero feature film.
The most compelling superheroes are flawed and burdened, not invincible.
White people in the U.S. do not experience the systematic disadvantage that constitutes oppression.
Black Panther (2018) was the first feature film in which the primary superhero was black.
Bruce Wayne's unresolved guilt over his parents' murder is the defining feature of his character.
DC comics have historically underserved the human dimensions of their characters.
Kryptonite is a storytelling crutch substituting for genuine character limitation.
Racism means believing one racial group is inherently superior and entitled to rule over others.
A bigot is someone intolerant of those who differ from them in identity or belief.
Bigotry is personal prejudice; racism is that prejudice combined with the power to enforce it.
Attacking someone for their skin color is racist regardless of who is doing the attacking.
CRT does not redefine racism; it analyzes the legal and institutional structures that perpetuate it.
To those accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression.
Western culture, given its global economic dominance, is not under assault.
The boards of Fortune 500 companies are predominantly composed of white men.
Black Lives Matter protests have, by a substantial margin, been peaceful gatherings.
A worker bargaining alone has little leverage to resist exploitation by an employer.
Workers require some form of structural leverage against management to negotiate fairly.
Women and minorities are grossly underrepresented in Hollywood.
White people are overrepresented in every significant seat of American power.
White Americans are increasingly the targets of socially acceptable prejudice in today's culture.
Racism, sexism, and classism all function to reinforce preexisting power structures.
White people are not always in the position of greater power.
Making assumptions about a person based on race is racism regardless of political framing.
Assault weapons should be bought back in the form of cash or tax credit.
Gun laws tend to apply to ordinary citizens while elites exempt themselves through private security.
America's level of gun violence is exceptional compared to peer countries.
The decision about what firearm a law-abiding citizen owns belongs to that citizen alone.
The AR-15 has legitimate civilian uses, like any other tool.
Rural defense against rapid animal threats is a legitimate use case for a semi-automatic rifle.
Private citizens do not have sufficient reason to own an AR-15.
The firepower legally available to citizens and to law enforcement should be the same.
Police should not carry weapons that citizens are not permitted to own.
Any regulation of firearms must operate within the limits set by the Second Amendment.
Encouraging a warrior mindset in police default behavior erodes community trust.
Some officers abuse the badge in ways that the better officers also recognize as a problem.
Top-tier research universities recruit talented researchers from around the world.
A significant share of military research funding should be directed to research universities.
Public investment in university research has produced large long-term returns.
The vast majority of immigrants appear for their immigration court hearings.
Border processing capacity should scale with demand rather than rely on harsher deterrence.
Refugees pay more in taxes over their lifetime than they receive in benefits.
Immigrants demonstrably grow the economy through entrepreneurship, labor, and taxation.
Immigrants commit crimes at measurably lower rates than the native-born population does.
If something we would call “God” did exist, we would be completely ignorant of its nature.
When the goal becomes winning rather than finding truth, the result is theater rather than debate.
Intellectual consistency is a basic standard of honest argumentation.
Without search, it is not clear how you find existing arguments on Agitate.
Living in a city means accepting that the place around you will change.
Adequate affordable housing is civic infrastructure, not a market outcome.
Anyone who wants to live in a city should be able to afford to live there.
The major events described in the documentary Leaving Neverland are credible.
The trend of posthumous Michael Jackson worship is real and worth naming, even if not universal.
Michael Jackson continues to be idolized in ways that go well beyond his music.
Michael Jackson's ongoing fame should be diminished as long as he is idolized beyond his art.
Michael Jackson's cultural legacy has not yet been honestly reassessed in light of what he did.
Kamala Harris's VP selection prioritized identity criteria over qualification.
Michael Jackson’s songs are enduring works of art that should be enjoyed by all.
A court verdict is not always correct; one is not obligated to accept what one knows is false.
The U.S. has a hybrid system of crony capitalism, not pure capitalism.
Freedom of exchange includes the freedom not to transact with any particular party.
Universal market access is a prerequisite for calling a market truly free.
A free market requires transparent information between buyer and seller.
Woody Allen's films are overrated relative to their reputation.
A free market requires defining what conditions actually qualify as "free."
Capitalism cannot operate without genuinely competitive markets.
The sexual abuse of children has never been socially acceptable in any era of any civilized culture.
Woody Allen’s work and legacy should be burned to the fucking ground.
Art and artists should be judged in the context of the norms and constraints of their times.
Capitalism requires a genuine commitment to fair competition to function as advertised.
Capitalism should be firmly and consistently defined for any argument about it to be meaningful.
Machine Gun Kelly's music lacks the genuine angst that gives pop punk its tension.
Machine Gun Kelly's pop punk is derivative of Blink-182, pitched at a younger audience.
Blink-182 is a seminal band whose commercial scale and influence are undeniable.
A small number of films become cultural documents of their times in addition to being entertainment.
Art is reliably emblematic of the time and conditions in which it was created.
One album will eventually stand above the rest as the defining statement of the 2020s.
Dr. Dre's 2001 peaked on the music charts in December 1999, placing it in the 1990s.
The White Stripes - Elephant is the best album of the aughts.
Release date is moot, it is more important when an album achieves peak cultural influence.
Madvillainy - the legendary collaboration by MF DOOM and Madlib - is the best album of the aughts.
Dr. Dre's 2001 was released in 1999 and should not be considered for best-of-the-2000s.
Flogging Molly's name refers to an Irish pub they played so often it felt like beating it.
Speakerboxxx / The Love Below is the best album of the 2000s.
Drunken Lullabies (2002) by Flogging Molly is the best album of the oughts.
There is one album that represents the 2000s better than any other.
Agitate should have agreed upon definitions of words commonly used in discussion about Agitate.
New York pizza is unremarkable when judged on its actual qualities.
New York pizza enjoys a reputation that exceeds its actual quality.
The American system of government requires structural reform to meet its current challenges.
Government should serve the people who live under it, not the bureaucrats who administer it.
The American system of government could be substantially better than it is.
Government produces contradictory and unstable guidance that makes long-term planning impossible.
Continual review and refinement of regulations should be a standing priority of government.
Best album of the 90s?: Oasis (What's the Story) Morning Glory?
Automatic for the People by REM is a seminal album of the 1990s.
Regulation often imposes compliance burdens far in excess of the risk it mitigates.
The majority of combustible material in municipal waste is biogenic plant matter.
Municipal solid waste incinerators recover nearly all ferrous metals through magnetic separation.
Waste incineration with energy recovery is a better waste disposal alternative than landfill.
Landfills are maligned based on outdated assumptions about facilities from decades ago.
Modern engineered landfills are cost-effective, safe, and environmentally responsible.
Many municipal recycling programs accept material mixes that guarantee contamination.
Municipal recycling programs typically lose money to operate.
Subsidizing source reduction is more effective than subsidizing recycling programs.
Certain music albums become emblematic of the periods in which they were made.
Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise is one of the underrated classic rap albums of the 1990s.
The “good guy with a gun” is far more likely to exacerbate an active shooter situation than end it.
A single armed citizen in the crowd would prevent most mass shootings.
The album of a decade is the one that best soundtracks its most defining moments.
Hip hop's mainstream emergence in the 1990s was the decade's most important musical development.
Dr. Dre's The Chronic is the most important album of the 1990s.
The angst of suburban middle-class teenagers is as valid an artistic subject as any other.
Making punk palatable strips it of the confrontation and rage that define the genre.
You can’t have an album of the decade if the album existed in that decade for less than a year.
Nirvana is the most influential band in popular music history.
No other city of Seattle's size has had a comparable impact on popular music history.
Seattle's desirability as a city is part of what makes its housing problem so persistent.
Energy efficiency is good economics regardless of climate views, requiring no mandate to justify.
The global population must stop growing to combat climate change.
Increasing the U.S. population through immigration is in the national interest.
The full scope and degree of American racism is consistently understated.
For cultural chauvinists, pluralism is an existential threat to who they believe America is.
Owning a gun does not require an obsessive identification with gun culture.
The full extent of atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam will never be fully exposed.
The My Lai massacre exposed the impunity with which U.S. forces operated in Vietnam.
Abortion restrictions target women while leaving the men involved largely untouched.
The pro-life movement is structurally misogynistic in its treatment of women's bodies and choices.
Pro-life rhetoric unjustly shames women rather than supporting their decisions.
The New Deal coalition FDR built still defines what the Democratic Party aspires to be.
The Vietnam War was a shameful policy catastrophe of the American government.
LBJ passed more transformative domestic legislation than any president since FDR.
LBJ is the most formative president of the modern Democratic Party.
Southern Democrats were alienated from the party by its embrace of the Civil Rights Act.
The most overtly racist elements of the GOP coalition are now taking control of the party.
The Southern Strategy was politically effective at consolidating a new GOP coalition.
Cultural chauvinists are a reliably motivated voting bloc that political coalitions can recruit.
The GOP deliberately recruited racist elements as part of an electoral strategy.
Present generations owe no debt for the colonial actions of long-dead ancestors.
Moving documented predator priests to new parishes was a moral catastrophe, not a judgment failure.
Gonzaga's president must either credibly account for the housing of abusive priests or resign.
Gonzaga University was institutionally complicit in concealing priest sexual abuse.
"Pro-life" is a misnomer for a movement whose interest in life ends at birth.
The Republican Party's record on immigration is one of consistent restriction and dehumanization.
Catholics who refuse to welcome undocumented immigrants should be denied communion.
The migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border is in part caused by Catholic dogma.
The Catholic Church’s views on sex out of wedlock do more harm than good.
Abstinence-only sex education endangers children rather than protecting them.
Abstinence is an impractical and ineffective approach to birth control.
Contraception and abortion are essential infrastructure for women's equality in a modern society.
The United States could handle a substantially larger population through denser urban development.
Bitcoin is the best opportunity out there to build generational wealth.
Holders of Bitcoin should consider selling at current valuations.
Basic healthcare is a fundamental human right that should not depend on employment.
Physical capacity is not the binding constraint on American immigration policy.
America has practical limits on how many immigrants it can absorb at once.
A nation that takes pride in being built by immigrants should not bar the door behind itself.
On average, men are larger, faster, and stronger than women in athletic competition.
Women's sports generate less revenue than men's sports partly because they receive less investment.
Calling Elvis the "king of rock and roll" elides the Black artists he learned from and built upon.
Elvis Presley repeatedly took material from Black artists who could not reach mainstream audiences.
Black American culture's influence on mainstream American pop culture is consistently undercredited.
American culture has been substantially enriched by the contributions of immigrants.
Pay for female athletes should be on par with male athletes.
Elite teammates expand a player's effectiveness in ways no individual training can replicate.
In team sports, an individual can only excel to the degree their teammates allow them.
Only in individual sports can you truly judge a player’s greatness.
Baseball is woven into American identity in a way no other sport is.
Hitting a 90 mph fastball is more like a parlor trick than an athletic feat.
That baseball managers wear the players’ uniform is embarrassing.
Medicare and Medicaid should be privatized through a voucher system that introduces competition.
Many government programs continue running long after the evidence shows they do not work.
The VA outperforms private insurance on several key metrics of care quality.
Veterans are owed adequate care from the government that sent them to war.
A single-payer healthcare system is inherently more efficient than a fragmented multi-payer one.
Veterans deserve the best healthcare available, not the leftovers of an unaccountable bureaucracy.
The VA has some of the worst wait times and administrative failures in American healthcare.
Government-run healthcare adds bureaucracy without the competitive pressure that drives improvement.
Tying health insurance to employment is a historical accident and an outdated model.
The dangers of CTE make it unethical to encourage people to participate in football.
Legal personhood begins at live birth — that's been the recognized standard, and it's the right one.
The unborn deserve legal recognition of their right to life.
The U.S. spends a larger share of GDP on healthcare than any other developed country.
Government has both the responsibility and the leverage to repair a healthcare system this broken.
Avoiding climate catastrophe will require the average person's net carbon output to turn negative.
Only seven teams seeded lower than fourth have reached the NCAA championship game in the modern era.
Villanova's 1985 title as an 8 seed remains the lowest-seeded NCAA tournament winner.
Cinderella teams rarely win the NCAA tournament outright, even when they reach the Elite Eight.
Early upsets of high seeds in the NCAA tournament are structurally inevitable, not exceptional.
Sixty-eight teams out of more than 350 Division I programs are selected for the NCAA tournament.
The NCAA tournament gives any Division I program a structural chance at winning a championship.
The NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is the most compelling annual sporting event in the world.
Most large public events should be canceled during a deadly pandemic.
Executive stock-based compensation should be subject to a ten-year no-trade lockup.
Stock options give executives a personal financial stake in the company's short-term share price.
Many mergers are driven by managerial empire-building rather than productive efficiency.
Many corporate operations exist primarily to advance the political and social aims of their owners.
Markets are very good at providing goods people are willing and able to pay for.
The fundamental incentive structure of private business is to maximize shareholder value.
Collective action requires trust in the institutions asking citizens to make sacrifices.
Collective action requires that the sacrifices be genuinely shared.
Private businesses are structurally poorly suited to leading collective action.
The GOP consistently defends entrenched wealth over reformist change.
Decarbonizing the economy on aggressive timelines would create massive economic disruption.
The GOP's climate position reflects the interests of its fossil fuel donors.
Addressing climate change at the necessary scale requires coordinated collective action.
Any threat to the status quo is a threat to the elites whose position depends on it.
Sexual attraction is not a moral choice and should not be shamed.
A man who cannot treat women as equals lacks the strength he claims.
Traditional masculinity defines itself in structural opposition to femininity.
The performance of ultra-masculinity is unattractive in every sense.
Outward signaling of ultra-masculinity tends to compensate for an inner lack.
Men's dating priorities are shaped by commercial beauty standards more than they realize.
A father's first parental duty is to protect his family from harm.
Men should embrace the emotional and nurturing qualities traditionally coded as feminine.
Women are every bit as capable as men in the qualities that actually matter.
Trans girls should have their own unique opportunity to participate in trans girl club sports.
Religion conditions believers to believe the church’s doctrine in spite of evidence to the contrary.
Faith does not require feeling God's presence to believe in His glory.
Wolves rarely attack humans, and their predation on domestic animals is uncommon.
Wolves play an integral role in the function of a healthy ecosystem.
Wolves pose genuine threats to pets and to humans in the regions they inhabit.
The official inflation basket understates actual cost-of-living changes for ordinary households.
Economic conditions suggest a recession or depression is a plausible near-term outcome.
A city that only the wealthy can afford to live in is failing both economically and socially.
Gold derives much of its value from social conventions that are globally and historically stable.
Hydroelectric dams provide value that justifies preserving them.
Precious metals carry intrinsic industrial demand independent of their role as a store of wealth.
Hydroelectric dams provide clean, dispatchable renewable electricity.
Columbia River salmon populations are a small fraction of their historic levels.
There is little that separates cryptocurrency from precious metals as an investment vehicle.
Cryptocurrency investors hold the asset as a speculative bet rather than for productive use.
Bitcoin's continued returns depend on the increasing difficulty of mining additional coins.
Hard assets are more reliable than digital ones when underlying infrastructure fails.
Precious metals are a more reliable long-term store of value than cryptocurrency.
The Biden administration's stimulus spending fueled the inflation that followed.
The U.S. should return to a gold-backed currency to constrain monetary excess.
Cryptocurrency systems are designed to reward miners for participation.
Cryptocurrency mining's energy consumption scales with its market price.
Insects elicit a near-universal aesthetic aversion among humans.
Endangered species designation should prioritize species with significant economic role.
Universal protection from extinction is beyond the reach of any conservation policy.
Proof-of-work mining requires exponentially more energy to maintain the same output over time.
Cryptocurrency is, at its core, a Ponzi-like structure that produces nothing of intrinsic value.
Cryptoart based on non-fungible tokens does not merit acceptance as a sustainable model.
A free-flowing Snake River would deliver substantial environmental and recreational value.
Washington State needs to increase funding for Orca research.
Sex distinctions in sports are less binary in practice than the trans-panic discourse acknowledges.
Adolescence is hard enough without legislation that delegitimizes a child's identity.
Trans children should not be used as political props in culture-war fights.
Athletic competition should be conducted on as level a playing field as can reasonably be designed.
Where the line between fair and unfair physical advantage falls in sports is essentially arbitrary.
Trans girls should participate in girls' athletics on the same terms as any other girl.
Unfair advantages should be managed in sports, not ignored or magnified.
Supporting trans women requires accepting their gender identity, not merely tolerating it.
Sports help children build confidence, discipline, and a sense of belonging.
Trans girls who wish to compete in athletics should compete in boys' sports.
Trans girls have an unfair advantage over cis-gendered girls in athletics.
Competitive sports should be separated by biological sex to give women a fair competitive space.
Forcing trans girls into boys' sports as a condition of participation is exclusion, not policy.
Damming rivers raises water temperatures and slows river flow.
The Southern Resident orca population requires urgent state and federal action to avoid extinction.
Columbia River salmon populations face genuine extinction risk.
Motorized vehicles on public land should be confined to established forest service roads.
Public lands should be protected from development that would degrade them.
Public land management should balance competing uses rather than favor one exclusively.
Public lands should be managed to produce the greatest economic benefit.
The death penalty is neither an effective deterrent to crime nor cost-effective.
The death penalty is a justified response for the most heinous crimes.
A person who chooses a life of crime forfeits some of the rights ordinary citizens hold.
NEPA processes impede legitimate economic development on public lands.
Criminal conviction should not result in disenfranchisement.
Rural communities bear the brunt when environmental review processes are bypassed.
NEPA's litigation burden imposes disproportionate costs on rural communities.
Doxxing operations against fascists tend to amplify their profile more than suppress them.
One person, one vote is the foundational principle of democratic legitimacy.
Wildlife management should be driven by science and evidence rather than ideology.
Antifa humiliates organized fascist groups in ways that undermine their public standing.
Antifa exposes Nazi activity within local communities, which shrinks its reach.
Antifa coordinates deplatforming campaigns to silence ideological opponents.
Fish and Game agencies should not impose limits on non-native fish or game animals
Anti-fascist researchers do thankless, dedicated work that makes communities measurably safer.
Native species should be prioritized over non-native species in conservation policy.
Antifa celebrates political violence against those it has labeled fascist.
Antifa's posture is more theatrical than ideologically serious.
Antifa frequently manufactures the confrontations it claims to be reacting to.
Government should prioritize protecting clean air, water, and land.
FAIR uses civil-liberties language to protect anti-woke positions from criticism.
Many NASCAR fans were deeply offended by the banning of the Confederate flag at tracks.
Country radio's blacklisting of the Chicks for criticizing the Iraq War was an act of cancellation.
Investing in ventilation upgrades is a high-value protection for students against airborne illness.
The wealthy should bear a greater proportion of the tax burden.
Each round should be fired via the intentional action of the shooter
Magazine capacities should be subject to reasonable legal limits.
Luxury construction draws high earners out of older units, which then become more affordable.
Additional housing stock of any kind softens regional prices over time.
"Assault weapon" has no consistent legal or technical definition.
Developers prioritize luxury construction first because margins are highest in constrained markets.
More housing units of any type put downward pressure on rents over time.
Vaccines are essential infrastructure for an interconnected global economy.
Deploying GMOs without adequate containment strategies should be outlawed.
The long term impacts of GMOs on the environment is unknown.
The disruption of decarbonization can be mitigated through new technology and changes in behavior.
"Assault weapon" is too vaguely defined to be the basis of sound legislation.
The US government should outlaw the use or mercenaries and “security contractors”
Union work rules that prioritize seniority over performance impair an enterprise's ability to adapt.
Authorization for the use of military force should not be granted to the Biden administration.
Waging war should require legal authorization, public debate, and clearly defined objectives.
Duplexes, triplexes, and mid-rise apartments should be permitted by default across Seattle.
No one should be entirely priced out of the city they call home.
Seattle has ample opportunity to build at greater density than current zoning permits.
Many of Seattle's unhoused work locally and cannot move without losing their employment.
Many of Seattle's unhoused have local family ties that make relocation impractical.
Most of Seattle's homeless population originally lived in the area.
Seattle is expensive so people struggling to afford housing should go somewhere cheaper.
Seattle should not be responsible for out of town homeless coming to the city seeking services.
Seattle's homelessness crisis requires a coordinated city and county policy response.
Taking the enforcement of law into one's own hands is unaccountable and dangerous.
Some functions require the accountability of public authority and cannot be left to private actors.
Some issues only yield to collective action because individual action is inadequate.
Housing the poor should be the responsibility of charity not the government.
Expecting collective action from others requires being willing to act yourself first.
Vacant lots should be used for micro-shelter villages to house the unhoused.
Ranked-choice voting can replace the primary entirely with a single cleaner contest.
Ranked-choice voting changes campaign incentives to reduce negativity.
Ranked-choice voting is too confusing for the average voter.
Ranked-choice voting increases candidate diversity and produces more equitable representation.
Ranked-choice voting eliminates the wasted-vote and vote-splitting problems of plurality systems.
Washington state should authorize its local jurisdictions to use ranked-choice voting.
Ranked-choice voting should be adopted in elections wherever it can be.
The people with power to address homelessness do not personally bear its consequences.
Government should designate land for sanctioned shelters rather than allow improvised encampments.
The first priority in addressing homelessness is getting everyone out of the elements.
Unmanaged encampments expand and conditions in them worsen over time.
Sanitation services at encampments are a partial measure and cannot substitute for shelter.
Even well-intentioned government programs are corrupted by bureaucratic drift over time.
Using the .htaccess file to clean up the urls Agitate uses would be a nice improvement.
Until shelter is adequate, encampments should be provided basic sanitation services.
Encampment sweeps without alternative shelter merely relocate suffering.
Making life harder for people sleeping outside is cruelty, not policy.
Homelessness should be treated with the urgency a public crisis demands.
Agitate bug fixes should be given priority over new features.
Scientific procedures can get closer and closer to "truths" that don't - strictly speaking - exist.
Most of the Dr. Seuss catalog remains in print and widely available.
School boards should be appointed by rather than independent of local government.
Government should be no larger or more complex than the populace and its needs require.
Smaller states may not need separate tiers of local government at all.
City and county governments covering the same territory should be consolidated.
Multiple overlapping tiers of local government produce wasteful duplication.
The American Rescue Plan is the most effective anti-poverty legislation in a generation.
Restrictions on private ownership or sale should be reserved for items causing extraordinary harm.
The Dr. Seuss books discontinued in 2021 were not beloved works that will be missed.
eBay's policies on what items may be sold change unpredictably.
Removing offensive imagery from a legacy publishing catalog is responsible stewardship.
Progress toward a kinder society requires believing one is possible.
Organizing for social justice is one of the better uses of a person's time.
The activist movement labeled social justice warriors is a harmful cultural force.
Activist movements at times threaten business reputations to compel conformity to their views.
If a business makes a choice out of fear of having their reputations tarnished, that is coercion.
The Dr. Seuss discourse displaced attention from more important policy questions.
A publisher's choice not to publish a work is a business decision, not censorship.
Burning books is an attempt to permanently destroy the knowledge they contain.
Discontinuing publication of books on content grounds is functionally a form of book suppression.
Caricaturing Asian features in a children's book is straightforwardly offensive.
Certain historical caricatures of Black people are racist artifacts that should be treated as such.
The six discontinued Dr. Seuss books contained clearly racist imagery.
A cultural work is canceled when consuming it becomes socially untenable.
COVID-19 lockdown mandates are an overreach and should be disobeyed.
The suggestion of a shared obligation is a grievous personal insult.
We should reject any coercion toward an obligation to your neighbor.
Eventually control over Agitate should be given over to the collective.
Congress should pass the For The People Act to expand and protect voting access.
Agitate should prioritize accessibility in service of its mission to represent everyone.
A person should only be considered canceled if their livelihood has actually been destroyed.
There are real cases of cancel culture excess that merit attention without panic.
The term "cancel culture" should have an agreed-upon definition for when it applies.
Be part of the effort on Agitate for greater clarity through promoting convergence among assertions.
Link to sources on Agitate you feel confident you can stand up for the veracity of.
WandaVision's plot beats were widely predicted, a typical cost of corporate franchise storytelling.
Standards of craft and willingness to revise are what separate enduring work from forgettable work.
WandaVision was right to resist fan-theory bait rather than indulge in cameo-driven fan service.
The MCU's best work comes from singular creative voices, not committee-driven franchise management.
WandaVision (2021) was a creative risk that delivered in ways few Marvel productions have.
The Trump administration's words and actions repeatedly treated certain people as less than human.
The Trump administration's family separation policy was designed for its cruel deterrent effect.
Children separated from their families at the U.S. border are innocent of any wrongdoing.
Separating families at the southern border to deter migration is an atrocity.
Asylum should be granted to all those who legitimately seek it.
There should always be a reasonable legal path to American citizenship.
A person's utopia reveals what they most fundamentally value.
Imagining a utopia clarifies what one is actually working toward.
American citizenship should prioritize those who will contribute the most to the country.
Open borders are a worthy long-term direction even if not immediately achievable.
Welfare benefits should come without restrictions on how recipients use them.
The U.S. government should implement a universal basic income.
Charity erodes recipients' dignity in a way that rights-based government programs do not.
Permanent income support without work requirements undermines the dignity of self-provision.
Direct cash transfers are the most efficient form of government poverty relief.
Poverty is not inevitable; it is the result of policy choices that can be different.
Eliminating poverty is a policy choice within reach of any wealthy society.
Cities with significant BLM protests saw measurable reductions in police homicides.
BLM protests produced no measurable improvement in the cities that embraced their demands.
Welfare programs should require recipients to contribute toward their own support where possible.
The Left's commitment to free expression depends entirely on whether it agrees with the speech.
Liberal ideas cannot survive open debate, which is why they require deplatforming to spread.
No one in a country as wealthy as this one should go without food, shelter, or care.
Speech that directly causes panic or harm has always sat outside free-speech protection.
Free speech is either absolute or it is not a meaningful right.
Criminalizing speech hands government a weapon against any view it dislikes.
Confident takes on situations you lack context for are usually wrong.
Self-assessment of one's own common sense is generally unreliable.
Before concluding the critics are out of step, consider that you may be the one who is.
A social media feed reflects the median position of the user's bubble, not the broader public.
Judgments carry more weight when issued by a respected source.
Social media distributes the power of public judgment more widely than any prior medium.
Cancel culture's excesses are a predictable feature of social media, not an aberration.
News sources should be judged by their standards and track record, not their style.
The polish of a news source does not reliably correlate with its accuracy.
COVID-19 spreads primarily through close-contact aerosolized particles.
Maintaining six feet of distance from others helps slow COVID-19 transmission.
Wearing a mask in public during a pandemic is a basic act of community responsibility.
Reasonable precautions against COVID-19 transmission are appropriate during a deadly pandemic.
COVID-19 is a serious disease that killed more than a million Americans.
The Democratic Party is failing to take serious international threats seriously.
The Democratic Party's actions on behalf of ordinary people fall far short of its rhetoric.
The Democratic Party has failed the working-class communities it claims to represent.
Seattle should lid I-5 through the city's core to reconnect severed neighborhoods.
The hard part of public works projects is execution, not the decision to do them.
Representative government is the best mechanism for the law to reflect the will of the people.
Sovereignty rests with the people, not with the institutions of the state.
Legitimate government exists only by the consent of those it governs.
Military-grade equipment changes the culture of civilian policing for the worse.
Most police departments have more resources than their mission requires.
Police officers deserve the support of the communities they serve.
Tear gas should not be used by police on civilian populations.
Those who organize against fascism deserve community support.
Antifa exists as a response to organized fascist activity already taking place.
Antifa's use of force is generally defensive in response to ongoing fascist activity.
Antifa engages in lawlessness that federal authorities should treat as such.
Boogaloos are a violent fringe element without legitimate political standing.
The Proud Boys are a violent street gang with a political logo.
BLM is a peaceful movement — the violence around it comes from those trying to stop it, not lead it.
Black Lives Matter organizers deserve material and political support for the work they do.
Banning a book preserves the underlying idea by ensuring no one engages with it directly.
No category of knowledge should be placed off-limits as a matter of principle.
Qualified immunity functions as a shield against accountability for police misconduct.
Palestinians are governed by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, not by Israel.
We should boycott, divest, and sanction Israel until the apartheid ends.
Any legitimate government must treat its citizens equally, with no tiered classes of citizenship.
Standards expected of other nations should be clearly stated and consistently enforced.
Regulatory barriers to climate-relevant innovation should be reduced.
The technology required to respond to climate change at scale does not yet exist.
Succession is a sharply written examination of how power corrupts, well worth watching.
Chernobyl (2019) stands as one of the best limited series of the prestige television era.
How To with John Wilson is a singular blend of documentary and diary worth watching.
The prestige television era has produced shows worth the attention of any serious viewer.
A fork is the best utensil for salad because the tines pierce and secure the bite.
Chopsticks should be a common option at most eateries - not just Asian cuisine.
Chopsticks are more ideal for certain foods compared with alternatives.
Knowledge is power, which is why controlling access to it is always a political act.
Arguments built on edge cases that almost never occur are practically false.
Preparation can produce overconfidence that makes one more vulnerable to the risk prepared for.
Expert consensus, accumulated and tested over time, deserves trust within its field.
Labeling economic despair a mental health crisis obscures its economic origins.
Living one unexpected expense from disaster produces chronic anxiety and despair.
Facebook's content moderation has systematically disadvantaged conservative voices.
The Biden administration has positioned itself to leave a pro-labor legacy.
The Biden administration should publicly support Amazon workers organizing for a union.
Collective bargaining produces measurable gains in wages and benefits for the workers who use it.
Workers gain leverage through unionization that they cannot obtain individually.
Reducing global poverty requires growing the economies that the poorest billions live in.
Foreign policy’s goal should be to reduce suffering among the people of other nations.
Reducing avoidable suffering should be among any society's central priorities.
Traditional media's use of fact-checkers distinguishes it from unmoderated content sources.
Traditional media's use of editors adds a layer of review absent from social media.
Implicit bias training often produces no lasting behavioral effect.
Understanding why something happens does not by itself supply the means to change it.
Implicit bias training should be expanded into more decision-making contexts.
Every person carries some degree of implicit bias they did not consciously choose.
Capital compounds for those who already have it and is largely inaccessible to those who do not.
A fair economic system lowers entry barriers and raises challenges as one advances.
The underlying rules governing wealth accumulation need fundamental change.
Nuclear power is a clean, efficient, and emissions-free energy source.
Nuclear power has the best safety record per unit of energy of any major source.
Nuclear power should be utilized more readily as an emissions-free baseload source.
Burning fossil fuels is the principal driver of the warming we are seeing today.
Fossil fuel reserves need to remain in the ground to the extent possible.
Adequate nuance is required to communicate a claim with precision.
Excess nuance can blur the central claim of a message until it lacks force.
The road through Pike Place Market is an inefficient thoroughfare.
Pike Place Market should be closed to all traffic except delivery vehicles.
Closing certain roads to car traffic would improve community life.
Washington DC should be granted statehood to improve Senate representation.
Traditional media's fear of alienating its audience corrupts its journalism.
Subscribing to a local newspaper is essential to sustain local journalism.
Social media's reliability depends entirely on how the user curates it.
Traditional media has become too incurious to hold liars accountable.
Social media lacks the structural safeguards against misinformation that traditional media maintain.
The Supreme Court has settled that handgun bans are unconstitutional.
Responsible gun owners should not be restricted because of the misuse of a few.
Citizens should retain the right to decide for themselves which tools are safe in their hands.
The left routinely deploys the label of racism to end debate rather than engage on the merits.
The Republican policy agenda functionally upholds white supremacy.
The filibuster's primary historical use has been to block civil rights legislation.
Taxes on goods that impose social costs are economically beneficial.
Targeted public spending can redistribute access in ways that reduce wealth concentration.
Greater government spending is the appropriate response to economic contraction.
Looking out for others in one's community is a core civic obligation.
Every citizen should hold the best interests of fellow citizens at heart.
Each U.S. Senator's vote carries equal weight regardless of how many constituents they represent.
Low-population states hold a structural advantage in the Senate that grows more distorted over time.
Democrats loaded the reconciliation bill because normal legislative process had been broken.
Every added veto point in government further reduces its responsiveness to the public.
Win under the rules already established rather than rewriting them to suit your agenda.
Democrats' opposition to the filibuster shifts depending on whether it serves their agenda.
Pavement damage from a vehicle is proportional to its axle weight raised to the fourth power.
A single Hummer trip causes road damage equivalent to over 360,000 bike trips.
The U.S. Senate dramatically over-represents small-population states relative to their citizens.
The 60-vote Senate filibuster is not constitutional, only customary, and should be abolished.
Excess veto points make government unresponsive to those it governs.
Bicycle ridership should be heavily incentivized through investment in infrastructure.
Taxation should be designed to distribute its burden equitably.
Vaccines are broadly safe based on extensive rigorous testing.
No credible study has established a link between vaccines and increased autism diagnoses.
Free speech extends to all expression that does not cause direct harm to others.
Speech in service of selling a false claim becomes commercial fraud, not protected expression.
Free speech does not extend to deliberate psychological manipulation.
Unsubstantiated health claims by sellers constitute fraud, not free speech.
A remedy should be scientifically proven before being sold as medicine.
Where scientific consensus is clear, it should guide public decisions.
Wind and solar cannot provide the reliable baseload a modern economy requires.
Renewable energy capacity should be built out as fast as the grid can absorb it.
The pandemic revealed how chronically underfunded American public schools are.
A few well-enforced regulations achieve more than many poorly enforced ones.
Regulations should be simple enough that a normal citizen can understand them.
Bureaucracy breeds corruption wherever accountability is absent.
Government needs adequate resources to carry out its responsibilities.
The size and reach of the federal government must be actively reduced.
Power always seeks more power; this is the rule, not the exception.
Government, left unchecked, grows endlessly and eventually consumes its host society.
Continual review and pruning of unnecessary regulation is required for efficient government.
Pursuing good governance should be a top priority for any society.
Markets are legal-institutional constructs built and maintained by governments.
Free markets have lifted more people out of poverty than any government program in history.
Government takeover of services consistently produces rising costs and declining quality.
Agitate app should prioritize tools for sharing more meaningfully to users.
Agitate app should prioritize improving the browsing experience of explication links.
Agitate app should prioritize a visual map of arguments beyond those immediately connected to it.
Democrats must hold the line on democratic norms even when their opponents do not.
GOP governance consistently disregards the welfare of ordinary Americans.
In politics, ruthlessness consistently wins against principled restraint.
The Republican Party governs with a ruthlessness Democrats have repeatedly underestimated.
Concentrating power is the consistent through-line of the GOP's governing approach.
Debate is more concerned with winning than finding the truth.
It is more advantageous to use a pre-existing argument on Agitate that has existing engagement.
Social media businesses are structurally optimized to maximize user screen time.
Truth, when diluted to the level of banality, loses force on social media.
Social media has broken the gatekeeping monopoly on what voices reach an audience.
Social media has produced meaningful gains in human communication and organizing.
Algorithmic curation funnels users toward content that confirms their existing views.
Agitate is built around arguments and evidence rather than the feed-and-like loop of social media.
Without editorial gatekeepers, social media cannot reliably distinguish signal from noise.
Engagement-maximizing metrics reward conflict and discourage resolution.
Social media's incentive structure produces outrage as a feature, not a bug.
Agitate resolves the major problems with polling as a measure of public opinion.
Scientifically sound guidelines for safely reopening schools already exist.
The safety of students and staff is the paramount condition for in-person instruction.
Once safety conditions are met, schools should reopen without further delay.
Schools should only reopen when conditions for student and staff safety are met.
Prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns caused lasting harm to students' wellbeing.
Teachers should have been prioritized for COVID-19 vaccination to reopen schools.
Prioritizing vaccine recipients maximizes the public health benefit of a limited supply.
Every eligible citizen should be automatically registered to vote.
Government in the United States is structurally overrepresented by the Republican Party.
"Reverse racism" is not a coherent concept; prejudice without power is not the same as racism.
Racism is prejudice combined with institutional power, not prejudice alone.
Racism requires institutional power Black Americans do not hold.
Black Lives Matter operates in ways that put white Americans on the wrong end of its rhetoric.
The Black Lives Matter movement promotes racially divisive politics.
Failing to impose consequences on bad behavior invites more of it.
A president who incites insurrection must be permanently barred from office.
Donald Trump should be impeached and convicted for inciting an insurrection.
Public policy that demonstrably works should be funded regardless of its political source.
The cost of policy overshooting a problem is usually less than the cost of leaving it unaddressed.
Repeating a failed approach and expecting different results is foolish.
The COVID-19 relief package should have been more generous than what was proposed.
Efforts to reduce community water fluoridation should be opposed.
Better dental health from fluoridation produces measurable economic benefits for communities.
Health officials broadly agree that fluoride concentrations up to 1.5 mg per liter are safe.
At approved fluoride levels, no statistically significant cognitive effect has been found.
Militarizing the police creates a moral hazard that changes how officers see the public.
Police and sheriff departments should resist the militarization of their forces.
Assault weapons should be banned for non-military civilian use.
The U.S. military should never be deployed against American citizens.
Gun ownership laws that establish reasonable limits are constitutional.
Private individuals should never be permitted to possess weapons of mass destruction.
A certain degree of firepower should be off-limits to private ownership.
Every compromise on the Second Amendment opens the door to further erosion.
The Second Amendment exists so an armed citizenry can serve as the last check on government tyranny.
The Second Amendment was written so citizens can protect themselves without depending on government.
Citizens have a right to be armed against the threat of tyrannical government.
Citizens have a right not to rely entirely on government for their protection.
Government is a human institution and inherits the imperfections of those who run it.
Placing full faith in government has historically proven unwise.
Human-caused climate change is an observable, measurable phenomenon.
Every person deserves equal treatment under the law and in their daily life.
Race is a poor proxy for the genetic diversity that does exist among humans.
Genetic variation across racial categories is biologically small.
A person's gender identity arises from within rather than being constructed externally.
Granting personhood elevates a being's claim to respect above non-persons.
People are entitled to being represented fairly in a debate.
Misrepresenting someone invites their response in their own defense.
The most harmful content often produces the highest engagement.
Engagement metrics are a poor measure of whether speech is worthwhile.
Outsized platforms held by bad actors deserve to be reduced.
Engagement-maximizing algorithms amplify provocative speech.
Provocative speech generates more attention than measured speech.
A word's meaning can carry multiple facets that shift with context.
Shared definitions of words are a prerequisite for meaningful conversation.
Labeling criticism as cancel culture is often a way to dismiss it without engagement.
Canceling reduces a person's platform without preventing them from speaking.
Canceling someone is the act of reducing their social standing.
Some people genuinely deserve the social consequences they receive.
Cancel culture is a contemporary form of social ostracism extended through modern media.
Defending everyone who claims to be canceled launders some genuinely indefensible behavior.
Dismissing every criticism as cancel culture undermines legitimate accountability.
The term cancel culture has become too vague to do useful analytical work.
What is called cancel culture is often just the ordinary consequences of one's own speech.
No one should be fired from a private-sector job for holding a private political view.
Cancel culture undermines the academic freedom science requires.
Cancel culture operates as organized intimidation against ideological dissent.
Views with greater political consequence deserve greater scrutiny.
No one should be harassed or attacked for their personal views.
No one should be harassed or attacked for their political views.
Religious justification does not place a view beyond criticism.
No one should be harassed or attacked for their nationality.
No one should be harassed or attacked because of their gender.
No one should be harassed or attacked because of the race they belong to.
No one should be harassed or attacked for their sexual orientation.
Some functions are better served by government than by private enterprise.
Nothing inherent makes a government enterprise inferior to a private one.
Government operations face no competitive pressure to perform efficiently.
Flatness of form is one defining characteristic of a sandwich.
Means tests serve mainly as political cover against criticism that a policy is wasteful.
Means testing breeds opposition between included and excluded groups.
A public good, by definition, must be available to everyone in the public.
Means-tested eligibility produces some inclusions and exclusions that miss the program's intent.
The thresholds applied in means testing are necessarily approximate and somewhat arbitrary.
Any means test inevitably creates an in-group and an out-group with a contested boundary.
Means testing concentrates limited government resources on those who actually need them.
A government check is funded by other people's tax dollars and is not unearned wealth.
A tax cut returns money to the person who earned it in the first place.
Sound government policy can be evaluated by its net effect on the wealth of those it affects.
Individuals should be free to decide which vaccines to take.
Using a dictionary definition as proof of a claim is circular reasoning.
Dictionary definitions make weak evidence in substantive arguments.
A menu that categorizes a hot dog under sandwiches is making a category error.
Hot dogs fit in the sandwich category better than any other category.
Cutting another person's hot dog without their permission is socially inappropriate.
Cutting a hot dog in half is unusual enough to seem out of place.
Humans have a natural drive to sort and categorize the world around them.
Anything constructed by placing fillings between two pieces of bread is a sandwich.
A hoagie qualifies as a sandwich because the roll is split rather than separated.
Sexual abuse of children by the powerful crosses a line Americans will not forgive.
Jeffery Epstein was one person Trump couldn’t get away with pardoning.
White supremacy requires division and cannot coexist with shared humanity.
The American government violently displaced and attempted to erase Native peoples.
Mutual disrespect among citizens leads inevitably to internal conflict.
Mutual regard among people is the condition under which any society holds together.
Restoring power to Black Americans should be a national priority.
Securing the equality of any dehumanized group should be a societal priority.
Whiteness functions as a category constructed to consolidate power.
American society is structured around a hierarchy that places white people above others.
Native Americans are justified in their grievance against the American government.
Black Americans hold legitimate grievance against the society they live in.
Black neighborhoods are policed more heavily than others as a matter of policy.
Accumulating billions requires intelligence, risk tolerance, and resilience that no fool possesses.
Donald Trump's business success demonstrates entrepreneurial brilliance.
A Democratic majority would erode the freedoms citizens currently enjoy.
Climate change is a manufactured crisis used to justify expanding government power.
Keeping government out of citizens' lives is the GOP's defining principle.
Lower taxes strengthen the economy by leaving more capital in productive private hands.
The American system has produced more prosperity, freedom, and innovation than any other in history.
Building a just society requires removing racial inequities from the justice system.
You can't fix the justice system in isolation when it reflects a society that's unequal everywhere.
White supremacy's structures are most hostile to those they were built to exclude.
Police in general see black people as a greater threat than white people.
Police are not held accountable for their actions to a just degree.
Black people are stopped for looking suspicious far more often than white people.
Black people are stopped for looking suspicious far more often than white people.
Black people are stopped for looking suspicious far more often than white people.
Black people are stopped for looking suspicious far more often than white people.
Black people are stopped for looking suspicious far more often than white people.
Black people are stopped for looking suspicious far more often than white people.
Black people are stopped for looking suspicious far more often than white people.
Too much of the world's power is concentrated in too few hands.
Estate taxes are an effective check on the accumulation of hereditary wealth.
A more equitable society would produce broader human wellbeing across the population.
Human achievement can only reach its heighest heights when not limited by access to capital.
The more we are separated, the less trust and social cohesion is possible.
Society should reward people as motivation to strive for greater success.
Your next jump in wealth as reward for success - should get exponentially larger.
Success should be rewarded with a greater share of the spoils
How much society values you compared to others should be transparent.
The distribution of wealth should be smoothly parabolic when charted.
A progressive wealth tax should rein in fortunes that have grown beyond any reasonable threshold.
The point at which wealth inequality becomes offensive is 1:1,000,000
Resentment toward elites is a reasonable response to a system that concentrates gains at the top.
A wealth tax would reduce the public resentment that extreme inequality generates.
The same systems that exploit marginalized communities work to keep them from the ballot.
The right of every citizen to vote and have a voice in society is an unassailable principle.
Voting rights advocacy is an attempt to tip the scales for Democrats.
Releasing prisoners out into society puts lawful citizens in danger.
Non-white males are statistically less well-educated than white counterparts.
Non-white males are statistically less well educated than white counterparts.
Reforming a racially biased system without acknowledging the bias only preserves it.
The criminal justice system should not be the focus of reform where the goal is racial equality.
The criminal justice system actively produces racial inequality, not merely reflects it.
The criminal justice system should not adjust to correct for societal inequalities.
Non-white workers are paid measurably less per dollar than their white counterparts.
Aboliton of the prison system will cause undue stress to citizens
Use resources to fund education on cultural and community values that lead to racism
More policing does not address the root causes of crime and unrest.
The use of tear gas should be banned from use on protesters.
For all intents and purposes there is no such thing as a god
Joe Biden should choose a black person to be his running mate.
The Trump administration is putting the Republic at risk of collapsing.
The Trump administration has committed crimes against humanity at the southern border.
Police procedures and policies too often produce racist outcomes.
Police officers have a duty to intervene if a fellow officer is risking harm to others.
Police should be required to exhaust all other options before shooting a person.
Use those resources into building civil services for communities.
Police unions are too powerful and uphold racist structures of oppression
American policing requires substantive reform across multiple dimensions.
Whom a person loves causes no harm sufficient to justify legal restriction.
Homosexuality represents a departure from the natural order as understood through faith.
There are two sexes, and biology provides the basis for the gender categories built on them.
There must be reasonable limits on the firepower citizens may legally access.
Trustfund kids and internet billionaires do not deserve the money they have got.
The agreed upon ideal of wealth distribution is far less weighted to a vanishing small few.
Beyond a certain threshold, taxation amounts to taking what people have rightfully earned.
Taxing or otherwise penalizing success is the wrong response to people building something valuable.
A supernatural being is inherently beyond anyone's comprehension.
Pregnancy should not be imposed on someone as if it were a punishment.
Protecting a fetus necessarily means restricting a woman's choices about her own body.
There should be a limit on how far along a pregnancy can be and still be aborted.
A woman who becomes pregnant has a responsibility to that life rather than to end it.
A fetus is a human being with a soul whose life deserves protection.
Donald Trump's presidency provokes meltdowns among self-styled progressive activists.
Donald Trump prioritized American workers over the globalist commitments of his predecessors.
The harms of cash bail fall disproportionately on Black and brown communities.
Cash bail effectively criminalizes the condition of being poor.
Conditions outside of black Americans' control increase the liklihood for crimes to be committed.
Implicit bias measurably affects judicial sentencing decisions.
The degree of wealth inequality in America is beyond acceptable.
Black empowerment is what overdue justice looks like in practice.
Higher Black crime rates reflect higher Black offending, not just enforcement bias.
Police departments must be defunded and reimagined from the ground up.
Voting Democratic is the appropriate choice given current Republican policy positions.
Black people are convicted of crimes at a grossly disproportionate rate.
Justice should be applied without regard to the race of those involved.
The contemporary insistence that racism explains every disparity is overstated and harmful.
Joe Biden is the right choice for president in the 2020 election.
Donald Trump is too stupid to trust with decision making authority in any capacity.
Donald Trump's decisions consistently filter through what benefits him personally.
No Republican candidate should receive a vote until the party undergoes fundamental reform.
The GOP, by and large, denies climate change endangering our future.
The GOP is influenced heavily by a worldview that is anti-government.
The GOP is primarily interested in further concentrating the nation's wealth among a privileged few.
Donald Trump signals approval of racist actors without explicitly endorsing them himself.
Donald Trump is not intellectually curious to a stunning degree.
Agitate may offer an alternative business model for vital journalism and research
Agitate provides a place to adjudicate issues not possible elsewhere
A sandwich is properly constructed with two distinct slices of bread.
Most visitors arrive unfamiliar with what Agitate is or what it does.
A new visitor wants to learn what Agitate is and how it works.
Exploring the existing mapped arguments is a useful starting point on Agitate.
Thoughtful participation is what will make Agitate better over time.
Chiropractic practice lacks scientific support for most of its claims.
The COVID-19 vaccines met every required safety threshold for broad distribution.
The FDA cannot be trusted to determine the safety of vaccines.
A 3am vaccine appointment is acceptable if it means getting inoculated sooner.
A view should be critiqued only on the grounds it actually expresses.
COVID-19 vaccine sites should operate around the clock when hours are the bottleneck.
The Trump administration was involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s death.
COVID-19 vaccine distribution should minimize every barrier to access.
Discovering Agitate through social media is a common entry point.
Astrology has no plausible causal mechanism and no verifiable predictive power.
Claims not yet verified under controlled study warrant skepticism.
Means testing adds bureaucracy and stigma that often outweigh the savings it produces.
Government has failed to shield us from far bigger threats than what GMOs might pose.
Our government’s responsibility extends only to verifying plausible avenues of harm are assessed.
GMOs are held under greater experimental scrutiny than any other food.
All plausible hypothesis of GMOs posing a danger have been shown wrong.
When technology is understood it can be incorporated into life
Testing what we only know now won’t protect us from unknowns.
How can something be limited and still ever have a chance to be incorporated and trusted fully?
There must be a line drawn where we allow some risk from unknowns?
GMOs exhibit a significant enough danger that they should be banned.
Research into GMOs is limited to a select few with significant funds.
You shouldn’t buy GMO because an increasded market for them could bring about environmental harm.
We can rely on our government to implement effective regulation.
Techonology should never be banned when it can be regulated instead.
A single application shouldn’t impugn an entire field of technology.
GMOs regulatory framework is not robust enough to respond to unexpected threats.
GMO regulation must be fixed to support broader societal goals.
GMO research needs more government support to ensure innovation benefits society
GMO crops respond faster than any other agricultural tool to a sudden food supply crisis.
Allowing new innovations to only be deployed in emergencies would freeze innovation.
The standard is that any new technology must be limited if its harms outweigh its benefits.