Graham Platner should be supported for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat.
Every interaction black people and white people have with each other is likely to be skewed - to some degree - by implicit bias.
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 mission driving every decision of the police should be to protect and serve all members of the populace.
The police union is like any other, protecting its members employment.
Life as a police officer would be hell if under a microscope to the degree they should be to ensure our safety.
Taxes are not stealing.
Taxes are not punitive.
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.
The US political system is not designed to effectively isolate authoritarian tendencies from a 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 appearing female, but have a 5-alpha reductase deficiency and grow a penis at age 12.
You can be born legally male with an X and a Y chromosome, but your body is insensitive to androgens, and you appear female.
You can be born legally male with an X and Y chromosome, and have a penis and testes AND a uterus and fallopian tubes.
You can be born legally male with an X and a Y chromosome, but your chromosome is missing the SRY gene, which gives you a female body.
You can be born legally female with two X chromosomes, but one of the Xs has an SRY gene, which gives you a male body.
You can be born legally female with two X chromosomes, but your adrenal gland doesn't produce enough cortisol, and your body develops as male.
You can be born with XX chromosomes AND XY chromosomes (chimerism).
You can be born legally female with two X chromosomes, and also a Y chromosome, which gives you a male body.
Girls sports is about girls having the opportunity to enjoy sport.
There are practical reasons to separate people by gender.
Iran will be able to enrish themselves with tolls on passage through the Straight of Hormuz for the foreseeable future.
The Hormuz Straight Energy Crisis will have no conclusion until Donald Trump accepts total defeat.
The US will never reach a better state than when the Iran Nuclear Deal (The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action - JCPOA) was still in place.
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.
Trump should be impeached
America is losing the War in Iran
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
The Iran War reaches new heights for stupidity.
Trump thinks constantly about how he scam us out of more money.
Trump shows alarming deference to Russia/Putin.
Vaccine mandates have been common throughout history as sensible public health initiative.
The social contract requires all participants to surrender some of their freedoms.
An individual choosing not to vaccinate themselves harms all other members of society with decreased herd immunity.
Much of the violence experienced at BLM protests was from far-right infiltrators and agitators.
Police were often responsible for violence at peaceful BLM protests with overly aggressive crowd management techniques.
Humane treatment of Palestinians does not require Israelis to enjoy any less safety.
People have a right to exist, not nations.
Batteries make renewable energy systems reliable.
Homosexuality has been observed among many different animal species.
There is no plausible explanation for missing security footage from when Jeffrey Epstein died in prison other than a purposeful cover-up.
Any taxonomy of food would look at a hot dog and a sandwich, two foods where filling is added to leavened and baked bread, as similar enough to include in the same category.
When you want to categorize a broad swath of items, it is best to create a taxonomy for it.
Anything that can be tested with scientific methods but fails to produce evidence should be considered bullshit.
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.
In many equations, there are variables that would be valid to include but with such marginal impact that it might be not worth the additional complexity.
An acceptable level of risk will always exist.
Codename: Jack Hammer
Codename: Rock Hammer
Codename: Safety Glasses
Codename: Jeweler's Loop
Codename: Pin Hammer
Codename: Monkey wrench
Codename: Jigsaw
Codename: Chisel
Codename: Level
Codename: Snips
Codename: Staple gun
Codename: Socket wrench
Codename: Putty knife
Codename: Speed square
Codename: Stud finder
Codename: Utility knife
Codename: Vice grips
Codename: Needle nose pliers
Codename: Electrical tape
Codename: Glue gun
Codename: Rubber mallet
Codename: Caulking gun
Codename: Hacksaw
Codename: Philips screwdriver
Codename: Sledgehammer
I need to better understand what Codename:Vindaloo attempts to do in general
I need to better understand Codename: vindaloo
I need to better understand Codename: vindaloo vNow
I need to reduce toil
Launching billionaires into space is good for society.
SpaceX demonstrated reusable rockets after NASA gave up — private space exploration is one of the few areas where the market is taking humanity somewhere government couldn't.
Wealth is created by risk-takers and innovators — treating it as suspect produces less of it.
Honest Abe was a narc.
The homestead act, signed by Abraham Lincoln, stole land from indigenous Americans and gave it to white Americans, explicitly excluding black Americans.
The cultural genocide of indigenous Americans has never been acknowledged within the white community.
The US constitution is inherently racist.
The US constitution contained the three fifths clause.
CRT is a theory and therefore should only be included in advanced courses.
Critical Race Theory deserves greater adoption into curriculums.
US law is central to and complicit in upholding white supremacy.
Black people are provided poorer healthcare than the average American.
Racial disparities make it difficult for black people to get the most out of the education system.
Racial inequality is woven into legal systems.
Critical race theory holds that racism in the United States is systemic.
Critical race theory does little to change how racism should be defined.
Land has changed hands by force throughout history — what matters is whether it creates stability and civilization, and Israel created a functioning democracy.
Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, et al are directly to blame for the current detachment from reality of the Republican Party.
Hamas has stated in its own governing documents that its goal is the armed destruction of Israel — not peace, not two states. Take them at their word.
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 — this isn't a land dispute, it's a religious war with genocidal aims.
Hamas launches rockets from hospitals, stores weapons in schools, and builds tunnels under civilian neighborhoods — documented by the UN. Human shields is not a metaphor; it's their written military doctrine.
Palestinians have the right to exist and live with dignity — but Palestinian rights don't require the elimination of Israel, and both things can be true at once.
The United States was wrong to block a ceasefire in Israel by voting to “oppose” the UN Security Council’s call for one.
Any authority that can, should call for a ceasefire in Israel
The way Palestinians are treated by Israelis should not be tolerated.
Hamas is not mostly bad — it's irredeemably bad. Designated terrorist by the U.S., its founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews worldwide.
Individual racial prejudice — believing one group is inherently superior or inferior — is a moral failure, and that standard applies universally.
Government has no business telling people they can't live by their religious convictions — that's First Amendment free exercise.
I support Israel because it's America's strongest regional ally, the only true democracy in the Middle East, and because the Bible says to — none of that makes me anti-Semitic.
Jewish identity and the state of Israel exist independent of one another.
Criticizing Israeli policy on settlements or military operations is legitimate debate — it's not the same as denying Israel's right to exist or calling its founders colonizers.
Tying Israel to one’s Jewish identity strips them of the ability to define their relationship to their identity.
Conflating Jewish identity with Israeli state politics is not good for Jews.
Criticizing Israel is at least indirectly anti-Semitic.
Denying Israel's right to exist isn't a political position — it's a claim that Jews alone have no right to self-determination in their historic homeland.
For most Jews, Jewish identity and Israel are inseparable — Judaism is a people, a history, and a homeland, with a connection to the land of Israel going back three millennia.
After the Holocaust, the pogroms, and centuries of expulsions, of course Jewish people need a homeland where they can be safe — the case for Israel is written in blood.
The Holocaust killed one-third of all Jews alive — the need for a homeland isn't abstract sentiment, it's a two-thousand-year lesson in survival.
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.
The territory currently occupied by Israeli and Palestinian people should be a singular secular democratic state.
No nation-state has the inviolable right to exist.
An ethnostate should not continue to exist as is.
Israel has the right to exist — full stop. It's been the Jewish homeland for three thousand years, and the modern state was established legally.
The right to life doesn't evaporate because another group claims to be the larger victim — that includes the 1,200 Israelis murdered on October 7th.
When 3,000 rockets rain down on your cities and your citizens are massacred at a music festival, you respond — Israel has every right to defend itself.
Israel has sought to undermine good faith efforts by the Palestinians to work toward peace.
Israel provided material support to help build Hamas
Palestinians elected Hamas, Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel responded — the sequence matters, and Hamas bears primary responsibility for the civilian suffering that followed.
If you're a Palestinian who wants peace for your kids, Hamas is your worst enemy — they start wars they can't win and your children pay the price.
Hamas is a designated terrorist organization — October 7th, 1,200 Israelis massacred, women raped, children killed, hostages taken, is irredeemable evil.
The Israeli government is occupying Palestinian land.
The Israeli subjugation of Palestinians is a clear example of apartheid.
Zionism is a racist ideology.
Settler-colonialism is inherently genocidal.
Palestinians deserve our support.
Trans kids should have unfettered opportunities to socialize among other kids with their same gender identity.
Youth sports are primarily an opportunity for kids to socialize under the unique conditions athletics offer.
There are few instances where trans kid’s participation in sports raises questions of fairness in competition.
Overworked employees make more mistakes and produce lower quality output — shorter hours with focused effort often beats long hours with diminishing returns. Good management knows this.
Hunter gathers worked 20-22 hours a week.
The ideal amount of work for humans anthropologically is 18-25 hours per week.
A 4-day work week should be standard.
Working yourself to death is not a virtue — rest, family time, and recovery are part of a complete human life; nobody on their deathbed wishes they'd put in more overtime.
Capitalism has been destructive to humanity.
Price signals communicate more information, faster and more accurately, than any central planning system ever devised — centrally planned alternatives simply cannot replicate what prices do.
Capitalism requires a price system to allocate resources and services.
Competition among producers in an economy is beneficial to society.
Private ownership of the means of production is the arrangement that produces the most efficient allocation of resources — that's the empirical record.
Socialism means an expansive welfare state financed by the wealthy.
More than 185 death row exonerations since 1973 should give everyone pause — reserve capital punishment for cases where evidence is absolutely ironclad.
The death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment.
Abolish the death penalty.
Socialism combines economic and political power in the same entity that holds the legal monopoly on violence — the result is always corruption, inefficiency, and coercion. That's the system.
Cuba is the best example of a current socialist state.
Scandinavian countries would not describe their economies as “socialist”.
Scandinavian countries are good models for successful Socialist countries.
Commitment to Capitalism is the best defense against Socialism.
Socialism would offer no escape from your working conditions.
Socialism has failed at scale every single time — the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea. The implementation always fails because the ideology does.
Socialism means collective ownership of the means of production.
Socialism now.
Anonymity online leads to people losing site of their morals in their interactions and posts.
Nextdoor discussions regularly devolve into people being racist.
Even the semblance of real life community on Nextdoor, challenges some notions about the consequences of anonymity on social media.
Nextdoor is a social cancer.
When Michael Jackson comes on, I sit down — some think that's excessive, but I think it's the minimum appropriate response to what he did.
I don't listen to Michael Jackson anymore — I can't separate what I know about him from what I'm hearing. It's a choice I'm comfortable with.
Declaring people we once celebrated 'problematic' doesn't produce a better society — just a trail of burned things.
Ignorance is bliss.
When jokes that killed five years ago are now career-ending, you don't have a kinder culture — you have a more fearful one.
Universal just-cause employment rights would protect workers from the excesses of “cancel culture”.
Instances of “cancel culture” run amok are relatively rare.
Even mostly positive initiatives can be diminished by excesses.
Every acre of surface parking or highway right-of-way is an acre that could be buildings or parks — the car's claim on urban land comes at a real cost to everything else.
Roads, parking lots, and garages consume 30 to 50 percent of urban land in most American cities — car infrastructure is our most expensive land use.
Walkable commercial districts perform better than car-oriented ones — pedestrians make more spontaneous stops, support more local businesses, and generate more street life.
Parking minimums make non-drivers subsidize car infrastructure in their rent — people pay for parking they'll never use because the building was required to include it.
More parking options are good for local businesses.
Parking minimums don't solve on-street parking shortages — they produce off-street parking that eats building footprints, raises rents, and puts more cars on the street.
Induced demand is real — build a freeway lane and traffic fills it, build a parking garage and cars materialize. Adding parking capacity encourages more driving, not less.
Parking minimums for new development is smart policy.
If you don’t give residents a place to park then parking for everyone will be a nightmare.
Non-black people - distant from the Black experience - using the word “woke” can only take the awareness component of it.
The Black experience requires a language all its own to describe that remains foreign to white people.
“Woke” is a contemporary way to convey the need for Black folk to be aware of their social condition in order to at least survive it, at most change it.
“Woke” is a term that gets contorted to meet the needs of whatever negative connotation people wish to apply to it.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with being “woke”
Woke ideology is turning every institution it touches — schools, corporations, the military, professional sports — into a political re-education exercise that nobody voted for. It has to stop.
You won't fix the housing crisis from decision-makers who hold most of their net worth in home equity — their financial interest is in policies that maintain scarcity.
A homeowner on city council making density decisions has a direct financial conflict of interest, producing policies that harm renters and future residents.
A city of a million people occupies far less land than the same population dispersed in suburbs — concentrated settlement is our best conservation strategy.
If you want to protect forests and open land, live in a city — every urban resident is a person not clearing trees for a cul-de-sac.
Low-density sprawl consumes enormous land per household, requires car ownership for basic mobility, and is expensive to serve — pull growth back toward existing urban areas where we can.
The decision-makers in the real estate market are an oligarchy of developers and other wealthy characters. There needs to be a mechanism for less wealthy/influential players to control the trajectory of our built environments.
Manufactured homes cost less and deploy faster than site-built housing — dismissing the entire category while claiming to address the housing crisis is incoherent.
Modern building codes have added real improvements, but some requirements have become excessive and contribute directly to housing unaffordability.
Those who live in a community should have more influence than those who wish to commoditize that community.
Communities have a legitimate voice in how they develop — not unlimited veto power, but real input on character and pace.
Restricting development to manage affordability paradoxically makes it worse — more supply, even market-rate supply, moderates prices over time.
Cities that want to be progressive should prove it by building housing — local zoning decisions shape who can afford to live there.
Building codes that add cost to small buildings without proportional safety benefit often exist to protect incumbent housing values, not actual safety.
Upzoning just requires changing the zoning map — every city claiming it can't solve its housing crisis while maintaining exclusionary zoning is deceiving itself.
'Neighborhood character' objections to new buildings usually mean not wanting more people nearby — that's not a legitimate planning objection.
The housing crisis is a supply problem — build more housing; don't restrict it or regulate it into unaffordability.
Liberal cities should use their local power to deliver affordable housing.
Golf courses occupy prime real estate and bar virtually everyone from using it — the public subsidies many receive while excluding the public are hard to justify.
Golf enthusiasts are insufferable people.
Multiple tee boxes create meaningfully different challenges — what looks like the same hole plays completely differently depending on where you start.
Golf's core skills can be tested on a fraction of a traditional course's acreage — the full 18-hole format is tradition, not necessity.
The chemical inputs, water consumption, and habitat displacement of a golf course are significant costs for an activity that serves a small fraction of the population — a poor trade for land that could restore nature.
Golf courses consume land that in most cities could house thousands of people or serve as public parks — the exclusivity of what goes on that land compounds the problem.
Golf is the worst sport.
Greater police funding does not reduce crime.
Transit policy should largely discourage car ownership/ridership.
No new highways should be built nor existing highways expanded.
Elon Musk wants to finance Mars colonization through indentured servitude.
Digging tunnels to accommodate single occupancy vehicles fails as a transportation solution in terms of ratio of investment to capacity.
Elon Musk’s idea for tunnels with skates is a powerfully stupid idea.
Promoting cryptocurrency is bad.
On net, Elon Musk sucks.
Musk put up $100 million of his own money for a carbon removal competition — private capital competing to solve a technical problem beats any carbon tax or mandate.
Musk called subways a 'soul-destroying hellhole,' funded the Boring Company to avoid shared transit, and builds cars and tunnels for cars — he is explicitly anti-mass transit.
A greater shift to mass transit is key to combatting climate change.
Electrifying cars alone is far from sufficient for combatting climate change.
Elon Musk’s vision for the future is bleak.
Elon Musk should be exalted as a key innovator in the fight to combat climate change.
We must electrify everything - replacing all technologies that run on combustion.
Hyper-critical social media posts receive substantially more engagement.
Social networks allow violent ideologies to find new recruits with little opportunity for opponents to present another perspective.
There is little meaningful difference between multi-level marketing (MLM) and a pyramid scheme.
Many herbal supplements are sold through a multi-level marketing (MLM) business model.
The first amendment does not protect false speech in many cases.
The First Amendment protects false and offensive speech — but it was never meant to cover deliberate fraud or defamation, and we shouldn't pretend it does.
Facebook should ban herbal supplement ads.
The government should protect citizens from fraud.
We have tested most herbal remedies and the ones that actually work are just considered medicine.
Most herbal remedies don't work — the ones that do got tested and became actual medicine; what's left in the supplement aisle is prayer in a capsule.
Most advertisements for herbal remedies should be illegal.
It is wrong to make false or unsubstantiated claims about the benefits of a product or service you are selling.
Online networks of partisans co-create worldviews that can become more and more extreme.
Political discussions on social media platforms are experienced as angrier and less civil than those in real life.
Through terms-of-service changes, app store monopolies, and regulatory capture, big platforms quietly reasserted editorial control over the internet.
The free flow of information does not guarantee a better informed populace.
New technology typically follows a predictable pattern where it is hyped to an unsustainable level before disappointingly cratering and eventually leveling off to an appropriate level.
The internet's promise of democratized information was captured by a few platforms that turned it into a polarization machine and ad-delivery system.
Anglo-Saxon culture has influenced many existing modern cultures but doesn’t continue to exist as a distinct culture of its own.
There is no coherently definable culture of whiteness.
There is no meaningful threat to “white culture”
The zeitgeist encourages minorities to preserve and celebrate their culture.
American culture celebrates diversity.
White people should protect their culture.
Qualified immunity for police must end.
There is no correlation between police killing people and crime rates.
Investing in crypto is greed.
Precious metals have value. Gold is a better conductor of electricity than copper.
Mining precious metals is less detrimental to the planet than mining cryptocurrency.
The US war in Afghanistan is militarily unwinnable.
After 20 years in Afghanistan with no oil, strategic waterways, or nuclear program at stake, continued troop deployment was pure institutional inertia.
Even with U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan , the Taliban has been gaining ground.
America’s toppling of the Taliban did facilitate genuine advances for Afghan women.
Early Christian writings spoke of Jesus in a way consistent with a mythical being similar to others of the time.
There is no physical or archaeological evidence for Jesus.
A historical Jesus never existed.
The Taliban are a theocratic totalitarian movement with no interest in any arrangement short of total control — there is no good-faith negotiation with them.
Choosing 9/11 to withdraw troops from Afghanistan is a perverse symbolic date to choose.
Biden’s commitment to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11th 2021 is the correct course of action.
The US has a moral obligation to the people of Afghanistan to provide a stable and secure country.
The US war in Afghanistan should be ended as soon as possible.
“Evil” is that which a society must never acquiesce to at risk of its continued existence.
“Forever war” is a normalized indefinite period of active military conflict.
An indefinite military commitment with no clear objective, no exit condition, and no win state is both a moral catastrophe and a strategic failure.
A war should be regularly re-examined and approved for extension by congress at consistent intervals.
War must be avoided unless it is the very last resort.
The decision to send people into combat should be treated with absolute gravity — not as a policy option, but as a genuine last resort.
Democrats have run every major American city for decades — Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles — crime up, schools failing, poverty entrenched — judge them by their results.
The Republicans fall in line with any and all means to increase their power. The Democrats cannot overcome ideology in any meaningful manner to get anything done.
Both parties gerrymander, fundraise from major donors, and change Senate rules when it suits them — the playbook is bipartisan, but only one party gets called on it by the media.
The republican base has been groomed over decades to believe party propaganda.
FDT
Since Nixon, Republicans have been sowing racial division in the US.
Trump took over the most powerful political party in America in three years without party office, decades of loyalty, or any apparatus of his own — and they fell in line.
Every consultant told Republicans to be moderate and appeal to suburbs — Trump saw the forgotten working class instead and went straight to them. His opponents are still trying to understand how that worked.
The Tea Party grew from working-class outrage at bank bailouts, Obamacare, and a $10 trillion national debt — the same coalition Washington ignored for thirty years that became Trumpism.
Surviving two impeachments, COVID, total media opposition, and FBI investigations to win the presidency twice is political mastery, whatever you think of the man.
The Pacific Northwest is one interconnected ecosystem.
A US Senate that is representative of all Americans equally would be controlled by Democrats.
Democrats underperform in the Senate and Electoral College — the systems that actually determine governance and judicial appointments — and the answer is winning more seats, not restructuring institutions.
Donald Trump lost the 2020 popular vote by more than 7 million votes.
Democrats have won 7 of the last 9 popular votes in US Presidential elections.
Donald Trump lost the 2016 popular vote by just under 3 million votes.
Democrats have won the Presidential popular vote in 6 of the previous 8 presidential terms.
The current members of the US Supreme Court were appointed over the last 8 presidential terms.
Liberals should rightfully control the US Supreme Court.
Free and fair elections where each citizen’s vote is counted equally would result in a reliably Democratic Senate and Presidency.
The Judiciary Act of 2021 expanding the court by 4 seats should be passed.
Staggered 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices would reduce appointment stakes and depoliticize confirmations — better than packing the court.
Rushing through a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg damaged the court.
The nomination of Merrick Garland being blocked by Republicans damaged the court.
The Biden Supreme Court commission does not include law professors Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman, authors of a highly influential proposal to expand the Supreme Court to 15 justices and have the key members of the Court be chosen in a bipartisan process to make the Court less ideological.
Packing the Supreme Court guarantees counter-packing by every future majority — turning the court into a permanent partisan battleground.
Both the Garland and Ginsburg episodes were bad — both sides played politics with seats that shouldn't be. The answer is less of this, not court-packing.
Expansion of the US Supreme Court would benefit America.
The US Supreme Court is grossly unrepresentative of the views and sensibilities of the American populace.
President Joe Biden ordered a study on overhauling the Supreme Court with a bipartisan commission.
The US Supreme Court must avoid the appearance of political partisanship.
When people stop trusting courts to be impartial, they stop using courts and start using other means — judicial legitimacy is the load-bearing wall of civic order.
Justice means the same law applied the same way to everyone — a court that departs from that becomes an enforcement arm for whoever controls it.
The ideal government should be defined.
Many Old Testament stories directly contradict the teachings of Jesus.
The Bible is the Word of God — inspired, not invented, written by men through whom God moved. That's my starting point.
The Bible condones rape, incest, slavery, mutilation and murder.
The Bible is bullshit. Any meaningful message is coincidental.
Ephesians 5:22 doesn't make a husband a tyrant — it makes him accountable to God for the leadership his family needs. That's a responsibility, not a license.
In the “traditional American family” the husband is the primary decision maker by default
Conservatives have an unusually high tendency for misogyny.
The “traditional American family” is misogynistic.
“Punching down” should always be avoided in comedy.
Comedy works by crossing lines — the rule to only punch up, never down was invented by people who wanted to protect themselves from jokes, not by people who understand how humor works.
Beyond comedy, “never punch down” is a sensible rule for political and social commentary in general.
Censoring accurate portrayals of transgenderism in schools denies the transgender community of legitimacy.
The power of the state to have any say in medical matters is fundamentally illiberal.
Only the individual - and in some cases the family - should have any say in the medical treatments to address their transgenderism.
Gender dysphoria is the predictable feeling of discomfort or distress that might occur in people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth or sex-related physical characteristics.
Being transgender or non-binary is not a mental disorder.
George Soros is a good and moral person.
The larger, longer and more complex a plan becomes the more difficult it becomes to keep it secret.
For a cabal to operate a program of child rape, murder, and cannibalism it would require an impossible level of secrecy not only among the elites who supposedly make it up but untold numbers of others facilitating it.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — that's the minimum standard for believing anything important, and the moment you abandon it, you're capable of believing anything.
George Soros eats babies.
The QAnon conspiracy is a case study in how rumor and baseless accusations come to be perceived as fact - an epistemological failure.
A federal mandate to inject a substance into your body is the most intimate possible violation of bodily autonomy — unconstitutional in spirit and it should be found unconstitutional in law.
There is a secret global cabal of elites who traffic, rape and murder children.
Right wing media regularly uses the least flattering photos available of women they dislike.
Right wing media is misogynistic.
Access Journalism is the result of traditional media outlets reacting to emerging media forms.
Requiring ideological purity before accepting useful help is how movements become ineffective — if the result is good, the result is good.
Vaccination mandates in the US have 170 years of legal precedent in their favor.
Officers put their lives on the line every day — the least we owe them is having their backs: proper equipment, legal support, fair pay, and community respect.
Officer safety is the first priority — every policy demand must be evaluated against what it does to officer safety; a dead officer protects no one.
We should all support HB 1310 in the Washington state legislature mandating police attempt to de-escalate situations first.
The police should use the uniform standard of de-escalation as the first resort in all potentially violent interactions.
To protect their customers and employees it is acceptable for a private business to set a policy mandating proof of vaccination
COVID-19 is here to stay.
COVID-19 is not a “new” pathogen at this point.
COVID is endemic now — treating it as an ongoing crisis in 2023 and beyond is either scientific illiteracy or a political decision to hold onto emergency powers.
COVID-19 is appropriately classified as a pandemic.
A pandemic is the worldwide spread of a new disease.
A mandate for proof of vaccination while still in the midst of an active COVID-19 pandemic before using mass transportation is acceptable policy.
Any sort of identification mandate is bad.
There is line to be drawn with the use of IDs where personal freedom is balanced against the common welfare of all.
The use of IDs and other credentials puts limits on our freedom.
Vaccine passports create a two-tier society — ban them at every level: federal, state, and private.
Make the case for vaccination — but barring people from concerts or planes without proof of injection is coercion, not public health.
Texas is banning the use of “Vaccine Passports”
The Biden administration is helping to coordinate independent/private efforts to create a more standardized “Vaccine Passport”
There shall be no federal mandate to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
There is not now nor will there be a federal database tracking COVID-19 vaccinations.
The government under Biden is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential pricing vaccination against COVID-19.
The government is trying to use COVID-19 vaccines to control people.
A “Vaccine Passport” is a credential presented to prove to some authority that the carrier is vaccinated against COVID-19
The Biden Administration wants there to be “Vaccine Passports”
Life begins at conception — a unique human organism with its own DNA exists from fertilization, and that life deserves protection.
Jesus is the Son of God — the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection are the claims of Christianity, and I believe they're true.
Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior — not a historical figure, a living God who died for my sins and rose again. That's the foundation of everything I believe.
Not every opinion is equally valid and not every perspective deserves equal weight — pretending otherwise is cowardice dressed up as open-mindedness.
We need to stop flying so often.
Colorado has some of the highest voter turnout in the country.
The MLB moving the 2021 All-Star game hurts business in Atlanta which is a majority black city
SB 202 in Georgia was predicated on the lie that there was fraud in the 2020 election.
Georgia Republicans enacted no-excuse absentee laws in 2005
Georgia's election laws are reasonable about access and serious about integrity — calling them voter suppression is a coordinated lie.
Colorado does not have any voting lines.
Colorado has automatic voter registration.
Colorado has mail-in voting.
Corporations making public statements about election law while bankrolling the politicians who pass it is textbook virtue signaling — it costs them nothing and they know it means nothing.
There are many Blue states with voting laws more strict than Georgia after SB 202
Colorado’s voting laws are more strict than Georgia yet the ostensible reason the MLB moved the 2021 All Star game there was to protest harsh voting laws.
The MLB has a lot to atone for with its history diminishing and oppressing black Americans.
Corporations can exercise tremendous power to fight back against regressive state laws by withholding business.
The MLB could more effectively counter SB 202 by organizing efforts to support democracy at the All-Star Game had they not decided to just move it.
SB 202 out of Georgia gives the legislature the power to overrule local and county officials.
Georgia’s voting law enforces strict ID requirements to vote.
Georgia’s voting law SB 202 expanded early voting - including weekends.
SB 202 expanded early voting on weekends, added drop boxes, and requires ID for absentee voting — that's election integrity, not suppression.
Corporations are no friend to the pursuit of social justice.
Delta Airlines contributes heavily to national politicians that oppose expansion of voting rights.
Delta Airlines contributed heavily to the sponsors of Georgia's election law SB 202
Corporations do not deserve praise for voicing support for social justice issues when their political contributions harm progress in those areas on net.
The MLB moving the 2021 All-Star Game away from Georgia in retaliation for SB 202 (GA election law) was the right choice.
Delta Airlines should be praised and supported for speaking out against SB 202.
Coca-cola deserves praise and support for speaking out against Georgia’s election law SB 202
Georgia's election law SB 202 should be condemned.
We still don’t have conclusive data or at least enough of it over a long period of time that confirms the vaccinated adults can’t shed the virus and transmit it to the unvaccinated children. The adults and kids a should continue to wear masks.
Mass transit works when people ride it — encourage ridership with good service and reasonable fares, not coercion or punitive car policy.
Car ownership should be discouraged.
Parking is not a public entitlement — free or subsidized parking means someone else is paying for a use of space with a real cost, and that subsidy shapes how cities develop.
Parking minimums require more parking than the market demands, raising construction costs and consuming land — the market should determine how much parking gets built.
Kids should be taught the existence of white supremacy in the United States today and throughput its history.
White supremacy can be overcome by methodically dismantling racist systems.
White supremacy creates “head winds” for BIPOC achievement.
To be privileged in some ways by racism is not to be racist yourself.
Kids should be taught white supremacy will prevent BIPOC people from achieving what they should.
Kids should be taught white people are racist.
Curriculums should be reviewed and adjusted to combat white supremacy instead of upholding it.
To protect yourself from unknowns is to live your life in a constant state of paranoia.
The threat of COVID-19 variants is unknown.
Young girls deserve the same opportunities to play sports as boys.
Women's athletics exists to give women a competitive space — it doesn't survive if biological males are allowed to compete in it.
Women’s sport’s are inherently discriminatory.
Bills should be supported applying similar standards as the Olympics barring girls with testosterone levels above a certain level.
Laws protecting biological women's sports are popular and defensible — conservatives should get them on the books.
Athletic programs are naturally quite competitive and will take full advantage of any opportunities that present themselves unless there are rules specifically banning the practice.
A “slippery slope” argument is generally highly speculative.
Policy should prevent the eventual pitfalls of “slippery slopes”, not the slopes themselves.
Without rules against it, elite programs will recruit biological males who identify as women, and women's athletics at the top levels will be functionally over — that's not a slippery slope, it's a foreseeable outcome.
Children still need to exercise precautions (outdoors, masking, distance) to limit exposure to COVID-19.
Time to party.
In recent studies conducted by the CDC, it was found that among fully immunized (≥14 days after second dose) persons, 0.04 infections per 1,000 person-days were reported for COVID-19.
Vaccinated adults meeting inside and unmasked do not pose a risk to the children in their lives who should otherwise exercise precautions to avoid exposure to COVID-19.
Adults vaccinated against COVID-19 should not transmit the virus.
Adults vaccinated against COVID-19 are unlikely to carry the virus.
The COVID vaccines are safe and they work — conservatives who trusted flu shots but drew the line at mRNA technology ignored solid data.
The everyday people killed by police are expected to have mastered all fear & perfectly, even psychically, reassured those cops to have prevented their own unjust death.
The public is readily willing to accept a cop’s fear for their life as an excuse for excessive force.
We should be able to have a conversation about valuing the lives of black people without immediately drawing attention away to everyone else.
Implicit in the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is that all lives matter. The BLM movement aims to make us live up to this basic ideal in a truly inclusive way.
To avoid the misconception that BLM aims to diminish other races, a better way to understand the movement is by looking at its driving phrase as “black lives matter, too.”
“Black Lives Matter” makes the simple and clear point that black people's lives are relatively undervalued in the US and the country needs to recognize that inequity to bring an end to it.
Saying 'Black Lives Matter' to the exclusion of 'All Lives Matter' implies some lives are elevated above others — whether intended or not.
All lives matter — every one of them. That's not controversial; it's the premise of a just society.
Crimes where the victims are black are less likely to see justice served.
When law enforcement fails to solve violent crimes, it emboldens the perpetrators. That's true in every community. The answer is better policing, not less policing.
Black people are right not to expect justice when crimes are committed against them.
Black people are right not to expect justice when crimes are committed against them.
Black Americans fear of police is completely legitimate.
Black Lives Matter is simply about black Americans not living in fear.
Laws banning trans kids from participating in sports by the gender they identify with are wrong.
If the ask — give up gas stoves, stop eating meat, pay a carbon tax — isn't proportionate to the measurable result, the answer should be no.
Separate is not equal.
Working-class Americans whose wages compete with illegal labor deserve compassion too — compassion that ignores citizens isn't real compassion.
We should be pouring government resources into the surge of unaccompanied minors coming to the southern US border.
Any food can be considered garnished if it’s purpose is purely ornamental.
Garnishes only serve to enhance the appearance of a dish.
Condiments are designed to be eaten with a food in a complimentary manner.
Peperoncini are a condiment.
Peperoncini should be defined as either a garnish OR a condiment, not both.
Adam Smith wrote, “ No society can surely be flourishing & happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor & miserable.”
The best case for capitalism is that it has actually raised living standards for hundreds of millions of people — imperfectly, but really.
Further delay or half-measures to address climate change will only result in more costly and drastic action needed later with less available upside.
We have squandered our opportunity to avoid the immediate impacts of climate change.
We are on pace for 3-4°C of warming by the end of the century.
We have now done more damage to the environment knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance.
We have added more CO2 to the atmosphere since the United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992 than we did in all the millennia that preceded it.
We should seek an innovation in measuring public sentiment.
The input necessary from stakeholders to fully represent a forum’s body would require an impractical period of time to gather/process.
‘Robert’s rules of order’ do a commendable job managing time.
Robert’s rules of order isn’t very good at building a consensus among unique individuals.
‘Robert’s Rules of Order’ are often the least bad option for a forum.
For large or combative groups, variations on ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’ are often employed.
The more people you add to a dialogue, the more unruly it becomes.
Even the most intimate 1:1 dialogues between people can result in misunderstandings.
We talk completely past one another on social media.
Labels like - liberal/conservative, Christian/atheist - carry with them the user’s baggage that is unilaterally applied to it.
There is tyranny in labels.
We should define things so we know what we are actually arguing about.
The ideal economy should soften the blow of economic missteps (insurances).
Corporations should only be chartered with a public stake through investment and over-site.
The ideal economy wouldn’t allow any entity to gain disproportionate power.
There's a floor below which a decent society shouldn't let anyone fall — but that's different from saying government redistribution is the right tool to hold it.
The ideal economic system would not allow extreme wealth concentration.
The ideal economy is capitalist.
Recent changes in climate have been clearly more dramatic and severe than at any point in earth’s history.
Earth's climate varied wildly for billions of years without human industry — what makes anyone think the last 150 years of fluctuation are uniquely our fault?
Earth's climate has been warming and cooling for 4.5 billion years, and the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today without industrial emissions — climate change is not new.
We should define our ideal economic system.
The government should use whatever resources necessary to completely eliminate homelessness.
The US government should spend funds to address poverty.
There are important things the government should prioritize spending money on.
The US should print all the money it needs to spend on just things so long as inflation never risks sharply spiking out of the 3%-5% range.
Rural v. urban is not a useful indicator of poverty in the US.
Rural workers earn less than urban counterparts for comparable work — a structural gap driven by labor market density and lack of alternatives, not productivity.
Meritocracy in its pure form doesn't exist, but pursuing it as an ideal — rewarding demonstrated performance — is still worth the effort.
Representation initiatives should target structurally disadvantaged groups defined by evidence of actual disadvantage — focused and defensible, unlike broad categorical preferences.
College entrance requirements are completely subjective.
Colleges should be required to accept a proportional number of rural/urban students in alignment with the state’s population.
Rural students face systemic disadvantages in college admissions — fewer AP courses, less counseling, less test prep — and that's a structural gap, not a talent gap.
Uniform density from edge to center is badly designed — the goal should be a gradient, denser near transit and commercial centers, stepping down outward.
The ideal level of population density could be theoretically infinite - varying less to more parabolically as you approach a city’s center.
Hong Kong and Taipei demonstrate that high-density urban environments can be highly livable — excellent transit, good public spaces, functioning economies. Density isn't the enemy of quality of life.
Rural upbringings can shelter kids from complexity — insulation from different people and ideas leaves them less prepared for the world.
Rural areas are better for raising children than in cities.
Dense cities done well have better parks, walkable streets, transit, and local businesses — density is enjoyable when it's designed intentionally.
There's a point where adding more people to a fixed space creates costs faster than benefits — good planning finds that optimum rather than just chasing maximum density.
A neighborhood zoned universally for triplexes barely changes the streetscape but allows three households where only one was legally permitted before — meaningful progress with minimal disruption.
Parks, greenways, and open plazas aren't luxuries — density works better when people have space to decompress, and open space belongs in the urban plan, not squeezed out by development pressure.
Most of Seattle should be upzoned — not to highrise density, but to gentle density: duplexes, accessory dwelling units, small apartment buildings.
Single-family-only zoning is the primary legal instrument of the housing shortage — you can't solve scarcity while keeping most land off-limits to additional households.
The denser a city, the more efficiently it functions — more people sharing infrastructure and public space is how cities create value; sprawl undermines that logic.
Dontae to your local NPR station.
Media optimizes for outrage because angry readers stay longer and generate more ad revenue — it's a machine tuned to your worst instincts.
I don't have to hate illegal immigrants to want strict enforcement of immigration law — they made a choice I disagree with; that's the distinction.
D. Trump’s legislative accomplishments are: passing a tax bill and renaming NAFTA.
D. Trump’s immigration policy was a failure.
Dignity deserves to be sought for American workers undercut by illegal labor, for migrants exploited by cartels, and for communities on both sides of the border.
The number of migrants apprehended in 2021 is less than in 2019, midway through the Trump administration.
Human life has value — that's why border security matters. Uncontrolled migration creates dangerous conditions for migrants and American communities alike.
Biden ended Remain-in-Mexico, halted the wall, and signaled the border was open — CBP encountered 1.7 million migrants in FY2021, which is a predictable policy consequence, not a natural disaster.
People who cross the border have legal rights through due process — processing, a hearing, removal if warranted — and you don't have to like them to respect the rule of law.
Real compassion at the border means stopping the dangerous crossings — chaos gets people killed in the desert and in coyote vans.
Someone crossing another country’s border should only elicit a military response if that person operates under the direction of a foreign government to injure the state being entered - in what it in good faith to believe is in self defense.
People crossing illegally get processed, housed, fed, and given legal assistance — the real cruelty is the false promises that led them here.
When cartels control border crossing points and traffic people and fentanyl, it's not a humanitarian situation anymore — it's a national security crisis.
Every sovereign nation has the right to defend its territory from aggression — the same principle justifies both Ukraine's defense and Israel's defense against Hamas.
As a vocal supporter of the Israel Defense Forces, Gal Gadot deserve scrutiny for her support.
It’s okay to be white, but not okay to not recognize what that means.
It’s okay to be white, but not okay to not recognize what that means.
Gal Gadot is an actress, not an ambassador — playing Wonder Woman is not a foreign policy statement.
Here meaningful is used to say that while there are surely exceptions to be found, the results of a fair survey would overwhelmingly side toward what it describes.
Choosing an Israeli actress to play Wonder Woman alienates Palestinians.
It's perfectly okay to be white — if that statement makes you uncomfortable, ask yourself why one group's identity is uniquely treated as suspect.
Blade was the first major Marvel theatrical release, and without Snipes's charisma and its commercial success, the modern MCU era might not have happened.
Meteor Man from 1993 was the first black superhero feature film — underremembered but historically significant, preceding Blade and Black Panther by decades.
The most compelling superheroes are flawed, burdened by their gifts, trying to do right in a complicated world — invincibility makes for bad storytelling and worse characters.
White people are not oppressed by any meaningful measure.
Black Panther (2018) was the first feature film in which the primary superhero was black.
Black Panther (2018) is overrated.
Bruce Wayne's unresolvable guilt over his parents' murder isn't a flaw — it's his character, and it makes him more interesting than any hero at peace with their origin.
DC comics have historically underserved their characters' human dimensions — Superman is a god pretending to be human, and even Batman's humanity is often secondary to mythology.
Kryptonite is a storytelling crutch — good characters have real moral and psychological limitations, not a magic mineral that turns off their powers.
Superman is the best superhero.
DC comics are superior to Marvel.
The MCU brought us Black Panther, the best superhero movie.
Hollywood acquires great independent work, sands off its edges, and scales it up until it's palatable to the widest audience — what made the original interesting is usually what gets removed.
The MCU has flattened superhero stories into franchise delivery mechanisms — every film has to service continuity rather than tell its own story.
Labeling inappropriate acts of bigotry as “reverse-racism” or “racism against white people” eliminates an important distinction the word “racism” should invoke.
Attempts to cast instances of bigotry against white people as “racism” are attempts to obfuscate the issues of racism.
Racism means believing a racial group is inherently superior and entitled to dominate others — expanding it to cover unconscious 'systems' makes it unfalsifiable.
A bigot is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
Bigotry and racism are not the same.
Attacking a group on the basis of their skin color is racist.
“Critical race theory” does not change definitions of “racism” but describes the power structures that make racism continue to exist.
“Critical Race Theory” attempts to graft notions of power structures onto the preexisting common understanding of racism.
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
White or “western” culture is not under assault.
The boards of Fortune 500 companies are mostly white men.
The US government is mostly run by white men.
Black Lives Matter protests have by and large been peaceful.
A solitary worker is easily exploited by their employer.
Workers have legitimate interests separate from management's — when labor markets are tight they have leverage, and when they're not, they need some other form. That's an observation about power, not a political position.
Women and minorities are grossly underrepresented in Hollywood.
White people are over represented in every meaningful seat of American power.
In today’s culture, white people are the ones most commonly persecuted.
All of the common -isms - sexism, racism, classism, etc. - is about re-enforcing preexisting power structures that advantage some at the expense of others.
The existing supply of assault weapons in America is itself an unnecessary danger to impose on the country.
White people are not always in the position of greater power.
White people cannot be victims of racism because racism requires its perpetrators be in the position of greater power.
Assuming what someone thinks, needs, or has done because of their race is racism — political intentions don't change that.
Labeling any act of violence by a white person against another race as “white violence/terrorism/supremacy” is racist.
Incidents of white terrorism - violent acts meant to keep other ethnicities in their place - are the most common form of terrorism in America.
Assault weapons should be bought back in the form of cash or tax credit.
Routine traffic stops by police are extremely dangerous for black and brown people.
Pretextual stops — pulling someone over for a cracked taillight or an air freshener — destroy trust; traffic enforcement should be limited to real violations like speeding, DUI, and reckless driving.
Gun policy must be equitable.
Rich men have armed security details. Politicians have Capitol Police. But they want to take yours. Gun laws are always for the little people — elites exempt themselves.
Don’t trust cops.
After the Civil War, freed slaves were disarmed first — every major gun control push in U.S. history has targeted the people elites wanted disarmed.
The second amendment is bad.
Gun ownership in America should be strictly limited.
America’s problem with gun violence is exceptional compared to the rest of the world.
America needs gun reform now.
Don't own an AR-15? Fine. Then your opinion on whether I should own one is worth exactly nothing. My constitutional rights don't expire because they make you uncomfortable.
An AR-15 is legal, reliable, and accurate — used for hog hunting, coyote control, and home defense; purpose determines whether any tool makes sense to own.
Thirty to fifty feral hogs can destroy crops and injure children in minutes — an AR-15 with a 30-round mag isn't overkill, it's the right tool.
Private citizens do not have sufficient reason to own an AR-15.
Same rules for everyone. If sheriff deputies in my county carry AR-15s, law-abiding citizens ought to be allowed the same. That's what equal protection actually means.
If police carry AR-15s on patrol, law-abiding citizens should be able to own the same — equal protection goes both ways.
Background checks and felony restrictions are fine — they have to pass constitutional muster. The Second Amendment isn't optional or conditional.
Warrior mindset has a time and place — when it becomes the default for routine traffic stops, trust erodes.
Police academies teach tactics and law but rarely distinguish between authority earned from community consent and mere power from a badge — that distinction matters.
Some officers abuse the badge — treating every stop like an interrogation, power-tripping on ordinary citizens. That's a training and culture problem, and the good cops hate it too.
Top tier research universities attract top tier talent from around the globe.
A significant portion of US military funding should be directed toward research universities.
Funding research at the university level pays great dividends.
Federal investment in research universities — DARPA, the NIH, the physics behind the internet — is one of the highest-ROI things government does; it's strategy, not charity.
Competing aggressively for the world's top engineers, doctors, and researchers is a net positive — that's completely different from unlimited unskilled migration.
Immigrants show up for a majority of their court hearings.
There should be a bias toward allowing more immigrants to pass through with less processing to alleviate surging numbers at the US southern border in 2021
Refugees pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.
Immigrants boost the economy.
Immigrants are not dangerous.
If something we would call “God” did exist, we would be completely ignorant of its nature.
Ascribing a feeling to “God’s love” is baseless.
When you're trying to win instead of find the truth, you'll twist words, ignore evidence, and move goalposts — that's theater, not debate.
The “...foolish consistency...” Ralph Waldo Emerson refers to in “Self-Reliance” as the “...hobgoblin of little minds” is an attachment to previous stances - a stubbornness. Changing one’s mind to be more consistent is encouraged.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
Say what you mean, don't argue one principle on Tuesday and the opposite on Thursday — intellectual consistency is just basic honesty.
The Vestigette platform resists arguments being made out of convenience - it should be hard (ultimately not allowed) to accept an argument in service to one line of reasoning but reject to strengthen another.
In Vestigette parlance, an “argument” is a point being made and also a point in a system (a node or vertex) representing the dialogue being mapped. It exists independent of a specific phrasing so it may more precisely be identified by the way in which it connects to other arguments.
Arguments on Vestigette should not be duplicated.
On Vestigette, users must accept or reject an argument independent of the other arguments they connecting it to.
Vestigette encourages intellectual consistency.
To find existing arguments on Vestigette, try leveraging your browser’s “find on page” feature to search for keywords on the ‘Explore’ page to find them among ‘Recent Assertions’.
Without search, it is not clear how you find existing arguments on Vestigette.
If you live in a city, change is the deal — trying to freeze your neighborhood at the moment you arrived isn't stewardship, it's NIMBYism dressed up as love of place.
Every unit built in dense urban areas is several acres of suburban sprawl that didn't have to happen — cities absorbing growth protects forests and rural character.
Affordable housing is infrastructure — a city that prices out nurses, teachers, and construction workers has a serious functional problem, not just a social one.
If you want to live in the city, you should be able to — that requires enough supply at enough price points that it isn't reserved for those who got there first.
Concentrating population in cities is more efficient per capita in almost every measurable way — smart growth policy should make cities more appealing to live in.
If a Vestigette user were to make a non sequitur argument and unendorse the connection before another user did - you’d have a wholly independent argument to work from and perhaps connect to the larger map (graph) at a later time.
New topics can be started on Vestigette by making a tenuous connection over multiple steps - like 6 degrees of Kevin’s bacon.
It’s not obvious how a Vestigette user can create an assertion completely independent of existing arguments.
In using Vestigette, I may have come upon a frequently asked question, an FAQ.
There is a quick video (no sound/no text comments) looking at UX when accepting an argument (access to because and therefore, phrasing and explications) and the reject view (access to rebuttal connections), then endorsing your own weighting to the existing arguments.
If you know the guy that built this, email him. He’d be eager to show you how to use his fanciful toys.
Celebrity worship substitutes projection for genuine relationship, creates parasocial dependencies, and produces exactly the conditions that protect people like Michael Jackson.
The art should be separated from the artist.
Leaving Neverland is credible — the detail, the corroboration, and the pattern give me no reason to doubt the major events described.
The trend of posthumous Michael Jackson worship is real and worth naming, even if it isn't universal.
Michael Jackson is still celebrated as a hero in tributes, streaming numbers, and cultural references — that's the reality that needs to change.
Harris won the 2003 DA race on her own in a contested election seven years after the Brown appointments — she put in the work, and the relationship history is still what it is.
Brown was still married to Blanche Brown during the relationship with Harris, made the board appointments while they were together, and has confirmed it publicly — documented facts.
Brown wrote about the relationship himself, and she received two board appointments worth $400,000 per year while they were seeing each other — it's in the record.
Jackson's survivors are still alive and still being gaslit by fans who refuse to believe them — every defense of Jackson is another way of siding with the abuser.
Jackson's survivors are still alive and still being gaslit by fans who refuse to believe them — every defense of Jackson is another way of siding with the abuser.
Michael Jackson is still treated as an icon on radio and streaming services — the cultural accounting for what he did hasn't happened yet, but it needs to.
Mike Pence can’t satisfy his wife.
Kamala Harris has a much more distinguished career than most Republican lawmakers
California represents 40 million people — that doesn't change that Harris's selection was driven by identity politics first and qualifications second. Both things can be true.
Biden's VP selection checked three identity boxes at once — woman, Black, Asian-American; that's identity politics driving the selection.
I won't play or promote Michael Jackson's music — a personal choice based on the weight of evidence about what he did.
Michael Jackson never hurt children.
Michael Jackson was a good person.
Michael Jackson’s songs are enduring works of art that should be enjoyed by all.
Courts get it wrong all the time — when the evidence outside the courtroom is this strong, the acquittal is a data point, not the final word.
We can detach the art from the artist.
Jackson's 2005 acquittal is a legal fact — it's also insufficient to settle the moral question, given criminal justice outcomes, settlements, and the power dynamics involved.
Monopolistic practices and corporate lobbying are the biggest threats to the free market — crony capitalism is capitalism's real enemy, and conservatives should be the loudest voice against it.
The documentary evidence in Leaving Neverland and the corroborating legal record point to one reasonable conclusion — acquittal in a criminal trial is not exoneration.
The evidence against Michael Jackson — documentary testimony, corroborating details, a pattern of behavior — is overwhelming; the musical legacy doesn't change what he did.
The U.S. doesn't have pure capitalism — it has a hybrid system where corporations big enough write their own rules and regulators and industries form crony relationships. That's the corruption, not capitalism itself.
You are not required to buy and sell among people you don’t care to.
Everyone can participate in the market.
Free markets have transparent information - the buyer and seller must meet with neither knowing something the other doesn’t.
Woody Allen's films speak to a narrow upper-middle-class New York sensibility that was treated as universal for longer than it deserved.
Woody Allen's films are technically accomplished but overrated — his cultural stature far exceeds what the films have earned.
We should define what makes a market: free
Using money and lawyers to attack a child accuser's family isn't self-defense — it's weaponizing resources against the vulnerable.
Capitalism needs free markets to operate in.
The rape of a child has never been socially acceptable in any civilized culture — anyone who touches a child that way knew exactly what they were doing.
Woody Allen’s work and legacy should be burned to the fucking ground.
Outdated or offensive content in art should be presented with context, not erased — censorship hides history, while contextualization confronts it.
Artists and their work should be judged in historical context — the norms and power structures of a given era shaped what was made and considered acceptable. That doesn't excuse everything, but it's a necessary lens.
Real capitalism requires fair competition — no player big enough to win through market power rather than merit; that's not socialism, that's the prerequisite for markets to work.
Capitalism should be firmly defined.
Machine Gun Kelly is a surface-level imitation of a form that required real angst — no tension, no edge, no surprise in the execution.
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black was the album of the aughts.
Machine Gun Kelly found a pop punk formula that works and repeated it — derivative, commercially real, aimed at younger audiences.
Machine Gun Kelly is good.
Blink-182 defined a moment, moved enormous amounts of music, and shaped the sound of an entire teenage generation — you don't get to dismiss that.
“Vestigette” is pronounced: vest-uh-jet (ˈvɛst-ɪʤ-ʤɛt)
Old School is a legitimate comedy classic of the aughts — better constructed than its premise suggests, with one of the great comedic characters of the era.
Mean Girls (2004) is the best comedy of the aughts.
Some films transcend entertainment and become cultural documents — you can't fully understand a decade without them. That's a small category, but it's real.
The best art reflects something true about the conditions that produced it — understanding those conditions is part of understanding the art.
SAULT’s Untitled (Black Is) is the album of the 2020s
SAULT's Untitled (Rise) is the album of the 2020s so far — anonymous, politically alive, made with a discipline and integrity that feels genuinely rare.
One album will stand above the rest as the defining statement of the 2020s decade — the question of which one is still being answered, but the argument is worth starting.
2001 peaked in December 1999 — it's not an aughts album, and however good it is, it belongs in the 90s conversation, not the 2000s.
Enema of the State is the best album of the aughts.
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.
2001 was released in 1999 and doesn't qualify for best-of-the-2000s arguments — chronological integrity matters if decade rankings are going to mean anything.
2001 by Dr. Dre is the best album of the aughts.
Flogging Molly took their name from an LA Irish bar they played so frequently it felt like they were flogging the place — a bit of self-deprecating humor about overworking a venue.
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is the album of the aughts — two completely different masterpieces on one release, Big Boi's tight funk alongside Andre 3000's genre-defying avant-pop.
Flogging Molly is an awesome band.
St. Patrick’s day is a crap holiday.
Flogging Molly is a St. Patrick’s Day novelty band.
Flogging Molly is named after an Irish pub they played so often it felt like they were beating it — a choice still worth reflection for a band with explicit Irish cultural ties.
Flogging Molly (band) sucks.
Drunken Lullabies (2002) by Flogging Molly is the best album of the oughts.
Every decade has one album that captures it better than the rest. The aughts have a clear answer if you're willing to follow the logic to the right place.
Vestigette should have agreed upon definitions of words commonly used in discussion about Vestigette.
Vestigette should have agreed upon standards.
Weezer’s blue album is the best album of the 1990s.
LA is the best food city in America.
In Vestigette parlance, an “assertion” is the first phrasing of a previously unconnected vertex in the argument map - a proto-argument.
Test values passed from one page reload to the next alternating between submitting differing weights (endorse) and adding unique assertion.
California is the food Mecca of the United States.
Dookie is the best album of the 1990s.
NY pizza is nothing special.
New Yorkers overhype everything about New York.
New York pizza overrated.
$35 trillion in national debt, a Congress that hasn't passed a budget on time in decades, and a regulatory state crushing small businesses — we need structural reform.
Government should work for the people who live under it, not the bureaucrats who administer it — that requires fewer agencies, clearer rules, and real accountability for failure.
The system rewards dysfunction — spend your whole budget or lose it next year, write ten rules for every edge case, hire more staff to justify the department. America can do better.
Government responds to the last crisis, not yours — two years after filing an OSHA comment, they'd 'consider' my concerns; we'd already fixed the problem ourselves.
One agency says safe, the next says dangerous; one administration rolls back rules, the next reinstates them — industry can't plan or invest. That's your government.
Regulations written in 1972 are still on the books because nobody made time to review them — reviewing outdated rules is the job.
There is an SQL failure - proportions of endorsements get miscalculated and ultimately result in insert errors due to duplicates.
Best album of the 90s?: Oasis (What's the Story) Morning Glory?
Automatic for the People is one of the most perfectly realized albums of the 90s — REM made a record about loss and quiet grief that somehow became a mainstream hit.
Regulations that cost $10 million in compliance to mitigate $100,000 in risk happen constantly — Washington imposes the burden without ever running a cost-benefit analysis.
Plant-based materials in an incinerator release carbon that's part of the natural cycle — completely different math from burning fossil fuels.
Waste incinerators recover ferrous metals through magnetic separation before combustion, giving you energy production and metals recovery in a single pass.
Incineration with energy recovery beats landfill on greenhouse gases, land use, and methane — landfill methane is 25x more potent than CO2, and waste-to-energy is the answer we keep ignoring.
Stockholm heats a quarter million homes on waste incineration; Japan has hundreds of plants operating safely near residential neighborhoods — we built a few in the 1970s and then dumped in landfills ever since.
A modern engineered landfill is managed, monitored, and far better than the poorly run facilities from 50 years ago that gave landfills their bad reputation.
Modern engineered landfills have geomembrane liners, leachate collection, and methane capture — they're not the open dumps from 1965, and the narrative needs to catch up.
Accepting glass, wet cardboard, and mixed plastics together guarantees contamination that renders the whole batch landfill-bound — these programs are structured to fail.
Most cities lose money on recycling programs — materials are contaminated, trucks burn diesel, sorting costs millions; the economics have never worked.
Reducing waste at the source beats sorting contaminated mixed streams after the fact — recycling manages the symptom, source reduction treats the disease.
We built curbside recycling because it made people feel good — when China stopped buying contaminated recyclables in 2018, most went straight to landfill. The virtue signal was real; the environmental impact was not.
Nuclear power has been regulated into non-viability by a permitting system designed by people who fundamentally distrust the technology.
The argument about which album best encapsulates the 90s is worth having — getting it right means identifying what the decade actually was, not just what was popular.
Some albums capture the feeling of a generation so completely that hearing them later transports you — that connection between music and memory is real and worth taking seriously.
Music does something no other art form does — every culture across every era has relied on it to enrich the soul, and that's not a cliché.
Aquemini is the greatest 90’s album.
Gangsta's Paradise is one of the great rap songs, and the album is underrated — Coolio's blend of menace and reflection gave it more depth than its single-hit reputation suggests.
The “good guy with a gun” is far more likely to exacerbate an active shooter situation than end it.
Every mass shooting in history has one thing in common — the killer picked a gun-free zone. One armed citizen is a deterrent. FBI crime data backs this up.
The album of a decade should soundtrack its most defining moments in a way that makes sense to anyone who lived through it — technical achievement matters less than whether the music captures what those years felt like.
Radiohead - OK Computer is the greatest album of the 90’s
Hip hop going mainstream in the 1990s wasn't just a genre crossing over — it was Black American art claiming its rightful place as the dominant force in popular culture.
Dr. Dre's production on The Chronic established the G-funk sound and proved West Coast hip hop could define the mainstream — one of the most important albums in popular music history.
Feeling seventeen and restless and bored in the suburbs doesn't require material poverty to be genuine — pop punk is an authentic expression of that experience.
Punk that doesn't disturb anyone isn't really punk — making it palatable strips away the confrontation and rage that give it meaning.
Pop punk is terrible bad music.
Blink-182 became the defining band of pop punk — catchy, juvenile, enormously successful, and a genuine cultural artifact of late-90s suburban teenage experience.
You can’t have an album of the decade if the album existed in that decade for less than a year.
Enema of the State is the best album of the 1990s.
Nevermind is the best album of the 1990s — every track holds up, the production is perfect for the material, and nothing from the 90s has aged as well.
Nirvana is the best band in history — Cobain's songwriting, the raw force of their performances, and the way Nevermind cracked the mainstream open gave them more impact on what followed than any other band.
Nirvana, Hendrix, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden — no other city of comparable size has had Seattle's impact on the trajectory of popular music.
Seattle has produced Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Jimi Hendrix — the city's musical output is disproportionate to its size, and the grunge era alone puts it in the top tier.
Seattle's desirability — tech, outdoor culture, food scene — is exactly what makes the housing problem so stubborn and urgent.
Energy efficiency — lower costs, better engineering, less waste — is good economics regardless of what you believe about climate; no mandate is needed to make it worthwhile.
China's one-child policy sterilized millions of women, mostly by force and mostly in rural areas — population control always falls on those with the least power to resist.
More people would be an asset in the climate change fight if the sum total of an average individual’s efforts resulted in negative carbon output.
Fun designs for guns is tacky.
The global population must stop growing to combat climate change.
It is in America’s national interest to dramatically increase its population.
The scope and degree of racism in the US is largely understated.
The GOP will resist any attempt to integrate more people and cultures into American life.
Cultural chauvinists see pluralism as an existential threat.
Got three guns at home. They're tools. I'm not at gun shows every weekend wearing camo. Own what you need, know how to use it, move on with your life.
The atrocities committed by US forces in Vietnam will never be fully exposed.
The massacre and rapes at My Lai show how US forces in Vietnam acted with impunity.
Men are rarely the target of the pro-life movement’s sanctions.
The pro-life movement is inherently misogynistic.
Pro-life rhetoric unjustly shames women.
FDR is the most formative president of the current Democratic Party.
Vietnam was a policy catastrophe built on lies, and the men who served deserved better than a war their leaders didn't know how to win and were afraid to end.
LBJ is an underrated president.
Sex is a natural human function.
Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, HUD — all LBJ's legacy; the modern Democratic Party has been defending and expanding that welfare state ever since.
LBJ said passing the Civil Rights Act would lose Democrats the South for a generation — he was right, and that's historical fact, not a Southern Strategy conspiracy theory.
Northern Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act; Southern Democrats left over it and the South went Republican — that's documented history, separate from whatever motivated each individual voter.
The deplorable people the GOP were for years too worried to alienate, are now taking control of the party.
The Southern Strategy was politically effective.
Cultural chauvinists are an electorally valuable voting bloc.
The GOP cynically made common cause with the most racist elements of the country.
Descendants of people who were never colonized owe nothing for what happened 200 years ago — present people should be judged by their own actions, not the sins of ancestors they never knew.
Where a raper priest gonna go?
Moving documented predator priests to new parishes instead of removing them wasn't a judgment failure — it was a moral catastrophe.
It is plausible that a Gonzaga University president was not aware of the local reporting about housing rapist priests at the institution he leads.
Thayne McCulloh must issue a credible explanation for housing abusive priests at the Cardinal Bea House on the Gonzaga University campus or resign.
Gonzaga University was complicit in the cover-up of priest sexual abuse.
The Catholic Church’s cover-up of priest sexual abuse makes it impossible to have faith in the church.
Church leaders who covered for abusers bear full moral responsibility for the scandal — not the faith itself.
“Pro-Life” is a misnomer.
Sex is a natural human drive that can create life — the existence of that life doesn't disappear because the act was consensual.
The goal of the “pro-life” movement is to penalize and shame young women to discourage an essential human behavior.
Anti-choice laws increase poverty.
National prohibitions on abortion cause increases in impoverished children and families.
The GOP is anti-immigrant.
Republicans should be denied communion.
Catholics who refuse to welcome undocumented immigrants should be denied communion.
Catholics have an obligation to welcome undocumented immigrants.
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 sexual education should be outlawed.
Abstinence is an impractical and ineffective means of birth control.
Contraception and abortion are necessary to modern civilization.
Crowded countries are ugly, unhappy countries.
The US could handle greater population through denser cities.
Bitcoin is the best opportunity out there to build generational wealth.
HOFDL (Hold On [to your Bitcoin] For Dear Life)
Sell your Bitcoin.
Basic healthcare is a fundamental human right.
At the density of New York City, the entire world’s population could fit in the state of Texas.
Our labor market, housing market, and social safety net have limits — responsible immigration policy acknowledges those limits.
When you build a “shining city on a hill” it is a dick move to kick the ladder to it out from behind you.
America should welcome immigrants with few restrictions.
Black artists have historically been filtered and blocked from the mainstream by gatekeepers who preferred white artists performing similar material — that's the documented history of American popular music.
Women's sports generate less revenue partly because they receive less investment — the revenue gap is partly self-inflicted.
On average, men are larger, faster, and stronger than women — that's documented in athletic performance data, which is exactly why sports are sex-segregated.
Women's sports generate less revenue partly because they receive less investment — the revenue gap is partly self-fulfilling.
Calling Elvis the king of rock and roll erases the artists he learned from and built upon — the crown is debatable at minimum.
Elvis took sounds and specific recordings from Black artists who couldn't reach mainstream audiences — he was talented, and he habitually ripped people off.
Black American culture built the soundtrack of the 20th century — rock, hip hop, jazz, blues, soul, R&B — and mainstream culture's acknowledgment of that influence is still catching up.
Jazz, hip hop, rock and roll, gospel, blues — none of these would exist in their American form without immigrant and diaspora communities.
Leagues and athletics associations with large discrepancies in pay between genders should be forced to equalize pay.
Pay for female athletes should be on par with male athletes.
Women's sports deserve equal respect — the level of competition and athletic dedication isn't lesser because the athletes are women.
Fast Pitch Softball is more entertaining than baseball.
Basketball is the best team sport.
Basketball is the best sport.
Baseball is uniquely suited to radio — the pace works with narration, and a great broadcaster can carry an entire afternoon game on voice alone. No other sport transfers to audio as well.
Baseball is too slow of a sport.
Elite teammates expand your game in ways you can't replicate alone — a point guard who finds the open man, a wide receiver who commands double coverage, a center fielder who covers for his corners.
In team sports, an individual can only excel to the degree their teammates allow them.
Twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles across four decades, through injury and childbirth — the case for anyone else as the greatest athlete requires ignoring that record.
Only in individual sports can you truly judge a player’s greatness.
Tennis is the best sport.
Baseball's athleticism is real but distributed extremely unevenly — most players stand in position for the bulk of a game and occasionally sprint 90 feet.
Esports are better than traditional sports.
Baseball is woven into American identity in a way no other sport is — the rhythm, the summer-long stretch, the connection to history make it a genuinely cherished tradition.
Hitting a 90 mph fastball is more like a parlor trick than an athletic feat.
That baseball managers wear the players’ uniform is embarrassing.
American culture has dominated the world stage for a century, in large part because America absorbs and amplifies contributions from everywhere.
Baseball players are among the least impressive athletic specimens in the world of professional sports.
Baseball is the worst sport.
Canada has many attributes that the US should emulate.
Canada is better than the US.
Medicare and Medicaid should be privatized through a voucher system — competition drives better service and lower costs; the current system has no incentive for either.
Hockey is the best sport.
Head Start, DARE, ethanol mandates, Cash for Clunkers — programs studies proved don't work, kept running anyway because someone's job depended on it.
The VA regularly ranks higher on many measures vs. private healthcare.
Government efforts to address homelessness are an effective way to help struggling veterans.
The VA varies dramatically — some facilities are excellent, others are unconscionable failures. The solution is accountability and competition, not universal defense or universal condemnation.
Veterans gave up years, health, and sometimes families for this country — the underfunded VA and inadequate mental health services they get in return are a national disgrace.
A single-payer healthcare system is inherently more efficient than having multiple public and private payers.
Private health insurance is also a bureaucratic nightmare of prior authorizations, denied claims, and narrow networks — the current system gives you private greed and government inflexibility.
Veterans deserve the best healthcare we can offer — not the leftovers of a bureaucracy that can't be fired for failure.
The VA has some of the worst wait times and administrative failures in American healthcare — veterans served this country and deserve a system built for patients, not bureaucrats.
Private enterprise faces competitive pressure to reduce costs and improve outcomes — government healthcare removes both incentives; private control with proper regulation is the right model.
Government-run healthcare adds layers of bureaucracy without competitive pressure to improve — if the DMV is any guide, a government-run hospital network won't be different.
Employer-based health insurance was a WWII accident — companies used benefits to compete under wage controls — and there's no good reason to still tie healthcare to your job.
There is no perfect measure of when personhood begins, but the point of viability, as established in Roe v Wade is the most reasonable choice.
More football exposure means more CTE exposure — that's the documented biology of repeated head trauma, and the evidence is too strong to treat it as contested.
The dangers of CTE make it unethical to encourage people to participate in football.
American football's combination of strategic complexity, physical demands across wildly different positions, and the interplay of individual brilliance with team execution makes it the best sport.
The Super Bowl is the greatest sporting event in the world.
A human’s personhood should be recognized at the moment of live birth.
Unborn children have beating hearts, unique DNA, and recognizable human features — they deserve the law's protection, and the right to life doesn't begin at birth.
The US should implement a universal, single-payer system like Medicare for All.
The US largely ignores public health policies.
The current healthcare system is neither market-based nor government-controlled — it's the worst of both, with insurance companies and hospitals facing no real competition.
The US healthcare system is inequitable.
The U.S. spends 17% of GDP on healthcare — more than any other developed country — with much of it wasted on insurance overhead and defensive medicine.
The US healthcare system has terrible health outcomes.
U.S. healthcare needs reform — costs are too high, the VA is underfunded, rural access is a problem — but the answer is more market competition, not Medicare for All.
The government should optimize the healthcare system.
Existing greenhouse gases will already push us past 2 degrees of warming.
To avoid climate catastrophe we must find a way to make the average person’s carbon output negative on net.
March Madness has magic, but the Final Four is still dominated by top seeds — only seven teams seeded fifth or lower have made the championship game in the modern era.
Villanova's 1985 run as an 8 seed remains the lowest seed to win the NCAA tournament — a genuine outlier that proves the format can produce miracles, even if that miracle has happened only once in 40 years.
March Madness produces early-round upsets but sorts itself out as you advance — Cinderella makes the Elite Eight; she rarely wins it all.
Upsets in March Madness are structurally inevitable, not exceptional — high seeds get bounced early every year, and that's what makes bracket-filling its own national sport.
Sixty-eight teams out of 350-plus Division I programs make the NCAA field — inclusive by major sports standards, but the structure still favors power conference programs.
Any Division I program can win the NCAA tournament — the structure gives Butler the same bracket format as Duke, and mid-majors prove it regularly.
Rules... like... harsh my mellow, man.
Single elimination is variance-maximizing by design — the best team can lose in the first round, and that's the feature, not the flaw.
Sixty-eight teams, single elimination, three weeks — no other format produces upsets and bracket chaos at March Madness scale.
The NCAA Basketball tournament should be canceled.
Most events - common to normal life - should be canceled during a pandemic.
All corporate executive compensation packages should come with a 10 year no-trade clause for company securities.
Companies give their executives stock options.
Corporate executive compensation often incentivized short-term increases to the company stock price.
Many mergers/acquisitions are not the product of a legitimate business advantage, but the desire of management to grow the company.
Corporations often choose growth over what is best for all stakeholders.
Many “businesses” exist to further their owners political and social goals, rather than making a profit.
There are many businesses the do not generate a profit.
The goals of private business reflect the goals of the ownership, but usually require generating sufficient profit to maintain the business as a going concern.
The organizing principle of a corporation is to increase shareholder value.
Private business is very good at filling in the gaps to provide goods and services that are not necessarily mandated by government coordinated efforts.
Forcing businesses to prioritize collective climate goals fights their basic incentive structure — that's the feature of markets, not a bug to be engineered out.
Effective collective action requires trust in the institutions asking for sacrifice — most Americans distrust government and the climate establishment right now, and you can't skip that step.
Collective action only works when people believe the sacrifice is shared equally. When climate activists fly private jets and live in mansions, they're telling everyone else the rules don't apply to them.
Private business is poorly suited to leading collective action.
The GOP is beholden to moneyed elites resistant to change.
Eliminating fossil fuels by 2035 would wipe out 8 million energy jobs, send utility bills through the roof, and crush a manufacturing base we haven't started to rebuild.
The GOP is beholden to fossil fuel special interests.
Limiting climate change will require collective action.
Any threat to the status quo is a potential threat to the elites that benefit from it.
If given their druthers, the GOP would act in ways that would exacerbate the climate crisis.
We shouldn’t be shamed for what we are attracted to.
True masculinity treats women as peers.
Masculinity is often hostile to femininity
There are admirable aspects to femininity.
Ultra masculinity is gross.
“Ultra” is used here to classify as exceeding well beyond - to an extreme - the traditional accepted understanding.
Men should avoid outward signals of ultra masculinity
Men over emphasize commercial notions of beauty when choosing a mate.
It is okay to compete for everything in life - or parts - but it is also okay to not compete.
Burying fear is bad for anyone.
There are toxic elements to traditionally and commonly held notions of masculinity.
A father's first job is protection — keeping his family safe and standing between them and harm.
Men should embrace their feminine qualities.
Woman are equally capable to men where it counts.
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 that only exists when God feels close isn't faith at all — believing in His glory even when you can't feel it is what a real Christian life looks like.
Wolves nearly never attack humans, and domestic animal predation is rare
Wolves are an integral part of the natural, healthy ecosystem
Wolf hunting should be encouraged and unregulated
Wolves are dangerous to pets and humans
Wolf reintroduction into livestock country without compensation programs, population caps, or tools for ranchers was a policy failure — the ecological argument has merit, but the implementation was a mess.
The official inflation basket — adjusted for quality improvements and substitution effects — consistently understates what real people pay for actual life.
A recession/depression is likely.
Home prices in Seattle are unacceptably high for working people — a city where only the wealthy can afford to stay is worse economically and socially, and that demands a policy response.
In 2021 inflation rates have remained near historic lows.
Gold’s value is largely dependent on social structures and traditions, which exist globally, and therefore is unlikely to decline substantially.
The value “inherent” in gold is largely a social construct.
Save the dams.
Precious metals have inherent demand and therefore value beyond a store of wealth.
Hydro is clean, reliable, and dispatchable on demand — the anti-dam movement is strangest when it comes from environmentalists who claim to want clean power.
Fiat currency offers tools for managing the economy.
Fiat money is superior to commodity money.
The current Columbia River salmon fishery is a fraction of historic levels, making the potential value of rehabilitation enormous.
At some point the price of cryptocurrency will stabilize.
The four lower Snake River dams provide electricity, irrigation, and barge navigation — real economic value the salmon argument doesn't automatically trump.
There is little that separates cryptocurrency from precious metals as an investment vehicle.
The people who invest in cryptocurrencies- like any kind of futures speculation- are betting that it will be better to be holding this resource tomorrow than making it.
Bitcoin’s continued financial return depends on coins being harder to make in the future.
Hard assets work when the system fails — cryptocurrency depends on power grids and internet infrastructure, which makes it useless as a hedge.
Gold has industrial demand and millennia of proven value; crypto is an entry in a distributed ledger — one of these is money, the other is a game.
The potential value return of a making a bitcoin must stay above the price of electricity required to make it.
Inflation is the tax you pay when government spends money it doesn't have — Biden pumped trillions into a constrained economy and ordinary Americans paid it on groceries and gas.
The gold standard disciplines government — when you can't print money at will, you can't inflate away debt or fund wars on credit indefinitely. That discipline is why politicians abandoned it and why we should restore it.
Cryptocurrency is designed to incentivize mining.
Cryptocurrency’s energy cost is tied to its current price.
Bugs are gross.
Plants shouldn’t get endangered species protection.
Only animals with a material economic importance should be placed on the endangered species list.
We cannot protect every species from extinction.
Extinction is a natural outcome of evolution.
The “proof of work” model necessitates exponentially increasing amounts of processing power and thus energy to mine the same number of Bitcoins.
Cryptocurrency produces nothing, consumes enormous energy, and creates value only by convincing more people to buy in — that's a Ponzi scheme with extra steps.
Cryptoart - based on nonfungible tokens (NFTs) - as a model should be rejected
A wild free flowing Snake River would provide vast environmental and recreational benefits.
Washington State needs to increase funding for Orca research.
Rich schools get better facilities, better coaches, and better recruiting budgets — the competitive playing field is structurally unlevel before a game is played.
The distinction people try to draw between who should participate in women’s sports and who should participate in men’s is never as clean as they think.
Being a teenager is hard enough as it is.
We should endeavor to leave trans kids out of bullshit culture war battles.
Like the bathrooms before it, trans girls participating in sports is an overblown proxy argument for hating trans people.
Athletic competition should be conducted on a level playing field.
The line at which an advantage becomes unfair in sports is completely arbitrary.
Trans girls should be permitted to participate in women’s athletics the same as any other girls.
Sports shouldn’t allow unfair advantages.
Support trans women by not undermining their gender identity.
Participating in sports can help build kids self esteem.
If someone born male wants to compete in athletics, they compete with other males — the categories exist to make competition meaningful, not to validate gender identity.
Trans girls have an unfair advantage over cis-gendered girls in athletics.
Women's sports exist to give women a competitive space free from men's physiology — letting biological males compete against biological females destroys that premise.
Trans girls should not be forced to play boys sports in order to participate.
Damming rivers increases water temperature and slows flow
Southern Resident orca populations need drastic action by state and federal governments to avoid extinction.
Columbia river salmon are facing extinction.
REMOVE THE LOWER SNAKE RIVER DAMS!!!
Traditional gender roles reflect real differences in how men and women are built and what they're drawn toward — that's complementarity, not oppression.
Motorized vehicles should be limited to established forest service roads only.
Public lands should be protected from development
Public lands should be managed to balance all uses
Public lands belong to all Americans.
Public lands are resources — timber, minerals, water, grazing — that support rural communities and supply the economy; managing them purely for non-use is a luxury indulged by people who don't depend on them.
The death penalty has been proven to be neither an effective deterrent to crime nor cost-effective.
Some crimes are so heinous that death is the only just response. A serial killer, a child murderer, a mass terrorist — keeping them alive for fifty years at public expense is its own injustice.
Losing the right to vote while incarcerated is a measured consequence of crime — not a lifetime bar for most offenses.
NEPA hinders economic development on public lands
Conviction of a crime should not disenfranchise you of the right to vote.
Rural communities are the most at risk when NEPA is not followed
NEPA harms rural communities
NEPA has become a litigation weapon for blocking projects rather than a genuine environmental protection law.
Antifa's doxxing operations don't stop extremism — they make martyrs and grow audiences; counterproductive at best, thuggish at worst.
One person, one vote is the irreducible principle of democratic legitimacy — any departure from it requires extraordinary justification.
Wildlife management should be driven by science — control predators when they threaten livelihoods, protect species when the data supports it. Not ideology; data.
Antifa researchers spend countless hours IDing fascists to protect communities.
Antifa humiliates fascists like Proud Boys, Hammerskins, and Atomwaffen.
Antifa exposes nazis to their communities.
Antifa coordinates to deplatform speakers, destroy careers, and silence dissent — that's not fighting fascism, that's the tactical playbook of fascism.
Fish and Game agencies should not impose limits on non-native fish or game animals
Anti fascist researchers do some of the most dedicated and effective work.
Native species should be prioritized over non-native species
Antifa celebrates political violence against anyone they've labeled fascist — which is anyone who disagrees with them — and calling it self-defense is ideological violence with a semantic fig leaf.
These are bored middle-class kids who want adventure and have convinced themselves they're fighting fascism. The cosplay-level theatrics tell you everything about how seriously to take their ideology.
Antifa shows up looking for a fight, manufactures the confrontations they claim to be reacting to, and calls it resistance — it's political violence dressed up as principle.
Preservation of endangered species should be prioritized over the economic inputs from non-native sport fisheries
Clean air, clean water, healthy land are legitimate government priorities — the debate is whether the regulatory tools we're using are actually effective or just costly theater.
Much of the criticism of “cancel culture” is a bad faith attempt to work the refs of public discourse in their favor.
Critics of the Left for “cancel culture” will claim to have been “silenced” while their free speech rights remain robust.
The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) promotes uncontroversial stances on tolerance while laundering protectionism for stances long past their time for belonging to the dustbin of history.
Support the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR)
Some NASCAR fans were deeply offended by the confederate flag being banned at tracks.
People tried to “cancel” NASCAR.
People tried to “cancel” the NFL.
People attempted to “cancel” the [Dixie] Chicks.
School districts should focus on upgrading ventilation in schools.
Automatic weapons should be illegal
Bump stocks should be illegal.
The wealthy should take on a greater proportion of the tax burden.
Each round should be fired via the intentional action of the shooter
Magazine capacities should be limited
It’s more nuanced than that
Gentrification replaces affordable units with premium ones — even when total unit count stays flat, the mix shifts against lower-income residents; volume matters, but so does affordability distribution.
Luxury buildings draw high earners out of older stock, freeing those units for middle-income renters — filtering works directionally even if it's not perfect.
More units of any type — luxury or workforce — add to the overall housing stock and soften prices region-wide. It works slowly and imperfectly, but that's how supply-side dynamics function.
Look it up — 'assault weapon' has no legal or technical definition. The term was invented by California Democrats in 1989. You can't legislate a made-up category.
Developers build luxury first because margins are better in constrained markets — loosen zoning so they have to compete, and the whole market eventually moves downmarket.
More housing supply puts downward pressure on prices — Seattle rents keep climbing because demand grows faster than supply.
Vaccines protect not just individuals but supply chains and the economy — when infectious disease follows global trade, vaccination is practical, not ideological.
Union reps and management aligned on the enterprise's health is the only labor relations model where workers actually win.
Roads degrade from freeze-thaw cycles, sun, and moisture regardless of traffic, but heavy vehicles dramatically accelerate that baseline degradation — bikes barely register.
Deploying GMOs without adequate containment strategies should be outlawed.
The long term impacts of GMOs on the environment is unknown.
Advanced nuclear, carbon capture, precision fermentation — new technology will cut emissions faster than any government mandate; set the goal and let engineers find the path.
Can't ban 'assault weapons' when nobody agrees what the term even means. Pistol grip? Adjustable stock? Detachable magazine? Politicians are banning a vibe, not a weapon.
The US government should outlaw the use or mercenaries and “security contractors”
Union work rules optimized for incumbent protection — seniority over performance, rigid job classifications — make it nearly impossible for a business to adapt.
You need an address to apply for jobs and a phone number for callbacks — these aren't minor inconveniences, they're structural barriers that make escaping homelessness significantly harder.
There is no reason Biden should be granted authorization to use military force (AUMF)
Making war hard to start — through legal authorization, public debate, clear objectives — produces fewer wars; that's not weakness, that's the design.
Poor people can find jobs to support themselves.
Duplexes, triplexes, townhouses, and mid-rise apartments should be the baseline across Seattle — upzoning as the default, let the market build what people need.
A city that prices out working-class and middle-class people stops being a city in any meaningful sense — urban density is only valuable when it's inclusive.
Seventy percent of Seattle's residential land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes — you cannot build out of a housing crisis when most of the city is legally off-limits to anything denser.
Seattle hasn't run out of space — the constraint is zoning, not land; single-family zones represent enormous potential for gentle density.
If reallocation has been genuinely exhausted and the homelessness crisis persists, additional revenue is warranted — it costs more untreated than treated.
Many of Seattle's homeless are still working — in construction, service jobs, the gig economy — but can't afford housing on what they earn. They're local workers without a home.
Telling Seattle's unhoused to move somewhere cheaper ignores the family ties that bind people to a place — that's not a policy, it's indifference.
Most of Seattle's homeless population has local roots — treating the crisis as a magnet problem misidentifies both the cause and the solution.
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.
I'll support new homelessness spending when there's real accountability — show me the existing money is being well managed before asking for more.
Seattle doesn’t have enough space for more housing.
Homelessness at this scale requires deliberate intervention — resources, accountability, and clear metrics — not indefinite tolerance.
Seattleites expecting shelter be provided for the homeless should shut up unless they have invited the homeless into their own home.
Taking the law into your own hands makes you judge, jury, and executioner with no oversight — that's chaos, not justice. Self-defense is different.
Courts, military, and police require public authority that private citizens don't have — that's where government belongs, not in healthcare or education.
National defense, interstate highways, flood control — these are what government is actually for. Short list.
Housing the poor should be the responsibility of charity not the government.
Unless you are willing to act unilaterally you should not expect others to act collectively.
Micro-shelter villages on vacant city lots are a faster path to dignity than waiting years for permanent housing.
Ranked-choice voting can eliminate the need for primaries.
Ranked-choice voting reduces negativity in campaigns.
Ranked-choice voting is too confusing for the average voter.
Ranked-choice voting has been shown to increase diversity of candidates and create opportunities for more equitable representation.
Ranked-choice voting would eliminate “wasted votes” or vote splitting.
Washington voters should contact their representatives in support of SBH1156 which will allow local jurisdictions to conduct elections with ranked-choice voting.
We should support efforts to move to ranked choice voting for elections.
The constituencies that matter don’t want to help the poor.
King County has struggled to convert emergency shelter into permanent supportive housing at the scale the crisis demands — political will and resourcing have been intermittent at best.
Sanctioned camps with services or designated shelter villages beat improvised camps with no coordination — you can address homelessness more humanely with a plan.
Get people out of the elements first — no one should be sleeping outside in this climate. Shelter before everything else.
Unsanctioned encampments expand when left unmanaged — that's the argument for moving faster on shelter, not for tolerating indefinite growth of improvised camps.
Sanitation at encampments is better than nothing, but it doesn't solve the problem. Without shelter beds, service coordination, and mental health support, you're managing a crisis you should be ending.
Every bloated government program started with a good idea — then bureaucrats created fiefdoms and the original mission was forgotten.
An ideal Vestigette URL for arguments - using this one as an example - would be: “www.vestigette.org/688”
Using the .htaccess file to clean up the urls Vestigette uses would be a nice improvement.
I just learned of Vestigette on Facebook.
Until there's enough shelter, basic sanitation in encampments — portable toilets, trash collection — is harm reduction; you can't address a crisis by making it dirtier.
“Clean up” efforts of encampments are cruel.
Making life harder for people sleeping outside isn't policy — it's cruelty; the goal should be getting them into shelter, not punishing them to prove a point.
People are dying on Seattle's streets — if you wouldn't accept this level of crisis in any other domain of public life, you shouldn't accept it here.
Preventing Vestigette users from inputing invalid values into fields would be some low-hanging fruit for the next sprint.
Vestigette bug fixes should be given priority over new features.
WandaVision built something genuinely different for six episodes and then retreated to a standard MCU action climax in the finale.
Displaying only arguments that are immediately connected to the main argument, leaves Vestigette users ignorant of the wider universe of arguments on that topic - even those very nearby in the same “neighborhood” on the graph.
Vestigette app should prioritize adding a list of recently visited arguments to more easily navigate back.
Vestigette is difficult to navigate as a user.
In mathematics, limits describe points at which we can get closer and closer to even when that point doesn't exist in the space in which you're operating.
Scientific procedures can get closer and closer to "truths" that don't - strictly speaking - exist.
Most of the Dr. Seuss catalog remains readily available and celebrated.
School boards should be appointed by rather than independent of local government.
Government should be exactly as large as the job requires — every additional layer is another opportunity for waste, corruption, and losing sight of the mission.
A small state with 50,000 people doesn't need three tiers of local government. One accountable body, clear jurisdiction, no bureaucratic overlap. That's efficient government.
No reason the same territory needs two sets of administrators, two HR departments, two pension systems — consolidate city and county; it's waste, plain and simple.
County government, township government, water district, school board — every layer takes a cut of your taxes, and too many bureaucracies are chasing the same dollar. Consolidate the overlap.
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is poised to be the most effective law for fighting poverty in a generation.
H.R.1319 - American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 is good policy.
Restricting the private ownership or sale of an item is only valid if it can cause extraordinary harm.
The six books discontinued by the Dr. Seuss foundation in 2021 will not be missed.
eBay has a mercurial policy for what is inappropriate to be sold
The Dr. Seuss estate made the right call discontinuing 6 books containing offensive material.
We should be constantly reaching toward a kinder and gentler world.
Fighting for social justice should be celebrated.
SJWs are bad.
Social Justice Warriors threaten to damage the reputation of businesses if they don’t conform to their way of thinking.
If a business makes a choice out of fear of having their reputations tarnished, that is coercion.
We have much more important things to be talking about than Dr. Seuss.
Dr. Seuss was not “canceled” in 2021
A publisher choosing not to publish something is not “cancel culture”.
Book burning is an attempt to destroy the knowledge therein forever.
The six Dr. Seuss books being banned is tantamount to a digital book burning.
The Dr. Seuss books that will no longer be published are another victim of social justice warriors black mailing business with threats to ruin their reputation.
The men who “...wear their eyes at a slant.” from Dr. Seuss’ ‘If I Ran a Zoo’ are rightfully offensive.
There is a type of caricature of black people that should only be viewed as the racist artifact of a shameful past that it is.
The six Dr. Seuss books discontinued contained racist imagery.
The Dr. Seuss estate decided that six - lessor known works - of Dr. Seuss will no longer be published for offensive content.
Dr. Seuss was canceled.
A piece of culture is “canceled” when now verboten to take it in.
If they tell me to stay inside, I'm going outside — the government doesn't tell free citizens where they can be.
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 Vestigette should be given over to the collective.
Congress must pass HR1 - the For The People Act reforming and protecting our right to vote.
Vestigette should prioritize accessibility in service of its mission to represent everyone.
Accept an argument phrased terribly as long as the point is more or less the one you want to make - then put it a better way.
Someone has to have lost their livelihood for them to have been “Canceled”
There are legitimate cases of the excesses of “Cancel Culture”
“Cancel Culture” should have agreed up terms for when the label is appropriate.
Be part of the effort on Vestigette for greater clarity through promoting convergence among assertions.
Link to sources on Vestigette you feel confident you can stand up for the veracity of.
Vestigette could potentially be a really bad thing.
Vestigette is a good thing.
Vestigette has tremendous disruptive power.
Vestigette is a first of its kind communication tool.
Vestigette is a uniquely special idea.
WandaVision's plot beats were widely predicted before the finale — the cost of corporate IP storytelling is that surprises are rare.
The difference between work that lasts and work that doesn't is craft — the willingness to do it again until it's right.
WandaVision was wise to resist fan-theory bait — staying true to Wanda's grief rather than cramming in Mephisto cameos was the right call.
The MCU works when singular creative voices drive it and fails when it's made by committee optimizing for franchise continuity over storytelling.
The series finale of WandaVision was satisfying.
WandaVision was a genuine creative risk — a limited series built around grief and decades of sitcom history — and for most of its run it delivered in ways few expected from a Marvel property.
The Trump Administration regularly demonstrated through its words and actions that it saw some people as less than human.
The cruelty of separating families at the US southern border was the point of the Trump Administration expanding the policy.
Children separated at the border are innocent — they didn't choose to cross illegally, and the fault and accountability belong entirely to the adults who brought them.
Crossing the border illegally is a choice — when you bring your child into that choice, the consequences that follow are on you, not on Border Patrol.
Family separation at the southern US border is an atrocity.
Asylum should be granted to all those that seek it.
Legal immigration with a reasonable path to citizenship — absolutely yes; someone who comes here, works, pays taxes, and obeys the law has every right to become American.
Your utopia tells you what you actually value — someone whose utopia is open borders values global mobility over national sovereignty.
Doesn't hurt to define what you're aiming for even if you can't get all the way there. Utopia as a compass, not an expectation. Useful thought experiment.
Legal, controlled, merit-based immigration — bring in the best the world offers and keep out those who take more than they contribute. That's rational.
Open borders are a worthy ideal to pursue.
Welfare benefits should not have restrictions for how the money is used.
The US government should implement a universal basic income.
Charity is corrosive to the recipients dignity.
Welfare programs that treat recipients as capable of more actually work — permanent income support without work requirements does the opposite.
The government should give direct cash payments to the poor.
Poverty can be eliminated if we choose to.
Government should eliminate poverty among the populace.
Cities that had significant BLM protests had a reduction in police homicides.
Cities that embraced defund demands saw crime rise, cops retire early, and recruitment collapse — that's not reform.
Work requirements for welfare aren't punishment — they're an acknowledgment that recipients have value beyond their need.
The Left is only interested in freedom of expression when expressing ideas they like.
Liberal ideas can’t win in the marketplace of ideas.
There is a floor to the standard of living you should be willing to see for your fellow human - below which is unacceptable.
You shouldn’t be able to scream “FIRE” in a crowded theater without consequences.
Free speech is either absolute or it isn't a right — the moment government or corporations decide what's acceptable, you have permitted speech, not free speech.
Criminalizing words hands whoever defines 'harmful speech' a weapon against everyone else — the cure for bad speech is more speech, not silence.
No-knock raids on nonviolent drug warrants and asset forfeiture without conviction are real abuses of police power — conservatives should be first to call them out.
The more ignorant you are of crucial context the more likely your assessment of the situation is to be off.
Everyone thinks they have common sense the way most people think they are above average drivers.
When the standards people are held to differ from your own, it can just as easily mean your views are significantly out of step with the median viewpoint as it can mean the standards they are being subjected to are not representative of the appropriate stakeholders.
Social media gives the user an impression of a common wisdom that is not common at all - just an approximation of their unique bubble’s median position.
Judgement is best delivered from a revered source.
Social media democratizes judgement.
Excesses exemplifying “cancel culture” are what you should expect from social media.
Vestigette app should have arguments that can collect specific numbers and express the sentiment with the median value among all acceptors.
News sources should be judged on their standards.
The polish to a news source does not correlate well with the veracity of a news source.
You can trust a professional news organization.
Close contact aerosol spread is the driving factor in Covid-19 transmission, primarily when an infected person is in close contact with another person and transmit small liquid particles.
Maintain at least 6ft distance from others during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wear masks in public during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We should take every reasonable precaution to avoid the transmission of COVID-19
COVID-19 is a serious disease.
Developing software is hard.
China is building a blue-water navy, Iran a nuclear weapon, Russia rebuilding the Soviet empire, and Democrats are spending political capital on the military's pronoun handbook.
Democrats claim to fight for the working class while their policies kill American manufacturing, drive up energy costs, and flood the labor market with cheap workers — their record betrays their rhetoric.
Democrats spent fifty years dismantling what made working-class communities work — stable families, local industry, religious institutions, neighborhood schools. They serve elites, not people like me.
Lidding I-5 through downtown Seattle would reconnect severed neighborhoods, reduce noise and pollution, and create acres of usable public space — ambitious, expensive, and worth doing.
Deciding to build a lid over I-5 is easy — managing the design, funding, contracting, and construction to actually deliver it is where public projects succeed or fail.
Vestigette needs to make filters available.
We built a constitutional republic — elected representatives, accountable to voters, bounded by the Constitution; not a pure democracy or a technocracy.
Sovereign is he who decides exception.
Real freedom is only possible under God's authority — human governments corrupt and enslave, but submission to God's law leads to genuine liberty.
God is the only true sovereign — our rights don't come from Washington or from a constitution written by men. They come from our Creator, as the Founders themselves declared.
Every time government makes a problem worse, the answer is always more spending on the same failed approach — that's not progress, that's a protection racket.
Sovereignty belongs to the people — not to Washington bureaucrats, unelected regulators, or international bodies; they are the ultimate source of legitimate authority.
Legitimate government exists only by consent of the governed — when it stops representing the people who created it, it loses its claim to authority.
Police don’t need military style equipment.
Police - largely - have too many resources.
Back the blue — these men and women run toward danger when every instinct says run away, and they deserve support, not protesters calling them murderers.
The police should be abolished.
Police should not use tear gas.
Antifa deserves our support.
Antifa is a response to fascism imposed upon the community.
Antifa is only violent in defense of its community.
BLM organizers who called for defunding police, shut down freeways, and cheered burning businesses aren't protected protesters — they're rioters.
Antifa has been attacking police, assaulting journalists, and burning federal buildings for years. Time to enforce the law and stop letting political sympathy give them a pass.
Boogaloos are a violent fringe element with no political legitimacy. I don't want anything to do with them and neither should anyone who believes in constitutional order.
The Proud Boys are violent.
The Black Lives Matter movement is peaceful but exists in the midst of oppositional violence.
The police are violent.
Antifa is a violent extremist organization that assaults people, vandalizes businesses, and attacks police — no different from the fascists they claim to oppose.
BLM and Antifa marched together, coordinated bail funds, shared tactics, and shared bail funds after every riot. Pretending they're separate organizations is willful blindness.
BLM riots in 2020 caused $2 billion in property damage — the most costly civil disturbance in U.S. history; whatever they call themselves, that's not a peaceful movement.
Black Lives Matter movement activists deserve support.
Bail of $100,000 for a petty offense is a wealth tax on getting out, not justice — but bail for violent crimes protects the community.
Trans men should be accepted as men and trans women should be accepted as women.
We should accept people for who they are.
Creationist texts have no place in a biology classroom.
There is no excuse to ban books — you don't fix a bad idea by hiding it, you fix it by arguing against it.
There should not be any sort of forbidden knowledge.
Police officers granted qualified immunity unjustly shields them from accountability.
Gaza elected Hamas in 2006 knowing exactly what Hamas stood for — Palestinian leaders have made decisions that brought their people to this point, and accountability for that matters.
Palestinians elected Hamas to govern Gaza — Israel did not choose their government for them.
We should boycott, divest, and sanction Israel until the apartheid ends.
Israel is an apartheid state.
Apply the legal definition of apartheid — systematic oppression and racial domination — to Israel honestly, and the facts don't fit.
Israel must stop being an apartheid state.
Any government running dual legal systems — one for one ethnic group, another for everyone else — has lost its moral claim. Israel should apply the same rules to all citizens within its borders.
Vague threats and unenforced red lines deter no one — clear standards, consistently applied, are the only language hostile regimes respect.
Open the regulatory pathway for advanced nuclear, geothermal, and carbon capture — stop blocking innovation with permitting delays that stretch to decades.
Humanity survived the Medieval Warm Period, the Black Death, two World Wars, and dozens of catastrophes — we adapt better than any other species.
We don't have batteries to store a week of grid power or solar that works in a Minnesota winter — we're nowhere near ready to bet the entire economy on wind and sun.
The Green New Deal would cost $93 trillion by progressive economists' own estimates — destroying U.S. manufacturing and energy before moving the global temperature needle one degree.
Succession is as good as its reputation — razor-sharp writing, extraordinary performances, and a genuine understanding of how power corrupts.
Chernobyl is the best limited series of the prestige TV era — historically grounded, visually stunning, and morally serious, with a finale that's as good as television gets.
How To with John Wilson is unlike anything else on television — part documentary, part diary, part accidental philosophy, finding profound observations in the most mundane corners of New York City.
Beartown is about a hockey town, a rape, and the way communities protect their own at the cost of their most vulnerable. It's beautifully made and hard to watch. Worth it.
The Investigation reconstructs a murder case without showing the crime — just the quiet, methodical work of prosecutors building a case.
The prestige TV era produced work that rivals the best literature and film — don't let the medium's history of mediocrity sell the current output short.
Trained reporters with editorial accountability generally beat unfiltered amateur content for accuracy and depth — professional media has serious problems and serious value that's easy to take for granted.
Use a fork for salad — the tines pierce, secure the bite, and you don't lose anything on the way to your mouth.
Spoons are the best utensil for eating salad.
Chopsticks are hard to hold.
You can’t get a full bite using chopsticks.
Chopsticks should be a common option at most eateries - not just Asian cuisine.
Chopsticks are the best utensil for eating salad.
Chopsticks are more ideal for certain foods compared with alternatives.
There is an ideal use case for every design’s form.
Facts should exist.
Knowledge is power.
Selection bias is why graduates of avalanche safety class are more likely to die in avalanches.
Going to avalanche preparedness class makes you more susceptible to avalanches.
Things that are only true in vanishingly few circumstances for all intents and purposes false.
Preparation can lead to overconfidence making you more vulnerable to the very thing you prepared against.
There are certifiable experts in a field of study we should trust the perspective of in said field.
Someone who has spent 30 years studying a subject knows more than someone who read three articles — trust experts in their domain; that's not elitism, it's the reason we have experts.
A hot dog IS a sandwich.
Unwilling to critique the status quo, the powers at be label the pain caused by financial insecurity as a “mental health” crisis.
The people living one unexpected expense away from a dire situation have chronic anxiety and despair.
Too many struggle to meet immediate material needs while few have more money than they can spend in 10 lifetimes.
Facebook fears raising the ire of conservatives will result in regulation detrimental to their profits.
Facebook's documented suppression of conservative content while allowing left-wing outrage campaigns is bias, not neutral moderation.
The Biden administration wants to leave a pro-labor legacy.
The Biden administration should endorse Amazon workers drive to unionize.
Collective bargaining helps workers win greater pay and benefits.
Workers should unionize.
Free trade and industrialization in developing nations has done more to reduce global poverty than any aid program — you don't lift a billion people out of poverty with charity, you do it with capitalism.
Foreign policy’s goal should be to reduce suffering among the people of other nations.
The reduction of suffering for all should be a central priority.
Traditional media outlets can be more readily trusted than modern new media outlets.
Traditional media utilizes fact checkers.
Traditional media utilizes editors.
Implicit bias training has no lasting effect on behavior — in some studies it backfires by making people more conscious of racial categories, not less.
There's a distinction between mechanisms of explanation and mechanisms of change.
Implicit bias training should be more common in more situations.
We all have implicit bias.
Wealth accumulation is fairly easy if you already have money and damn near impossible if you don’t.
A fair game should start easier then get harder as you advance.
The rules of the game for acquiring wealth should be fundamentally changed.
Nuclear plants emit near-zero greenhouse gases and run 24/7 regardless of weather — the obvious choice for anyone serious about cutting emissions.
Chernobyl killed 31 people directly; coal kills 800,000 a year from air pollution — nuclear's safety record per kilowatt-hour is the best of any energy source.
France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear — zero emissions, 24/7 reliability. If climate change were the emergency Democrats claim, they'd embrace it.
Fossil fuels are the greatest contributors to climate change.
Fossil fuels need to be left in the ground to as great of an extent as possible.
Nuance is necessary to communicate with clarity and specificity.
Nuance can dilute the impact of a message.
The road through Pike Place Market crawls at pedestrian pace and consumes public space for minimal transport benefit — it serves almost no one well.
Pike Place Market would be better without through-traffic — close the main road to private vehicles, keep delivery access, and you've improved the experience for thousands of pedestrians.
Reclaiming road space for bike paths or pedestrian zones where the math supports it is good urban planning, not an attack on drivers.
We should support statehood for Washington DC
Washington DC should be added as a state to make the senate more representative.
Traditional media is too afraid to alienate what remains of its audience.
You should subscribe to your local newspaper
Social media is as reliable as you curate it to be.
The mainstream media has become a politically reliable brand, deeply incurious about anything that challenges its audience's worldview — that's not journalism, that's content.
Traditional media outlets are more reliable sources of information than social media.
Social media has fewer safeguards to prevent misinformation than traditional media outlets.
Society is better off without guns.
Heller settled it — D.C. v. Heller, 2008. Supreme Court ruled handgun bans unconstitutional. That's the law of the land. Case closed.
Millions of law-abiding gun owners get punished every time some lunatic commits a crime. Blaming all of us for one guy's actions makes no sense whatsoever.
Been around guns my whole life — never shot anybody. Nobody in Washington knows better than I do what's safe in my own hands. Stay out of it.
When 'racist' covers election law, school discipline, and tax policy, the word means nothing — it's a debate-ender, not an argument.
The GOP agenda upholds white supremacy.
The filibuster is racist.
“Sin” taxes are beneficial.
Taxes should be structured to incentivize things that are good for society/disincentivize things that aren’t.
Every car trip replaced by a bike trip saves money on road maintenance — bikes cause negligible road wear.
Government spending can help redistribute wealth concentrated among too few.
Fears of inflation tend to be inflated.
Government should respond to economic slowdowns with greater government spending.
A flat tax is the most honest system we can build — one rate, no loopholes, no carve-outs; rich people pay more in absolute dollars because they earn more. Fair by definition.
A citizen should always have the best interest of his fellow person at heart.
Real community is built on people looking out for their neighbors, not government programs — and we've forgotten how to do that.
Every US Senator’s vote carry’s the same weight as any others’ no matter how many more people some represent.
Low population states have a structural advantage in the Senate.
Rural country tends to be more conservative than cities.
Reconciliation can only be done once a year so democrats are loading COVID relief up with everything they’ll need in the coming year.
In 2021 the Democrats have to pass COVID relief through reconciliation.
Each additional veto point in government makes it that much less responsive to public will.
Win elections, pass your policies through normal order — if the rules aren't working for you, the problem is probably your policies, not the rules.
Democrats weaponize the filibuster for years and discover it's an abomination the moment they hold the majority — the rule didn't change, their interest in power did.
Axle weight raised to the fourth power determines road damage — bikes are functionally weightless in that calculation.
One Hummer does the same road damage as 364,520 bike trips — taxing bikes to fund road repairs they didn't cause is indefensible.
Road damage scales with the fourth power of axle weight — doubling a vehicle's weight multiplies road damage by sixteen, which is why heavy trucks are so destructive.
The US Senate is not representative of the people it has power over.
The 60 vote filibuster should be abolished in the US Senate.
We should avoid too many veto points in governance.
Subsidize bike infrastructure and get more people out of cars — the road math works heavily in bikes' favor.
Bikes contribute nothing measurable to road wear — taxing cyclists for road upkeep is a non-starter.
Bikes should be taxed to fund roads, same as cars.
Taxes should be levied in the most equitable way possible.
Thirty years of prayer and walking with God — that presence is as real as anything I've experienced, more real if I'm being honest.
Vaccines are among the most rigorously tested medical interventions in history — studied for decades, with overwhelming benefits and an established safety record.
No credible scientific body has established a link between vaccines and autism — the original Wakefield study was fraudulent, and the claim has been retested thousands of times.
Vaccines can cause autism.
Vaccines are dangerous.
Women deserve an equal role to men in society.
Free Speech gives people the right to express themselves to the fullest extent up to the point you cause direct harm to people.
You can make wild claims all you like but the moment you are selling what you are claiming then your speech is not protected.
Free speech does not give you the right to manipulate people.
Making health claims you can't substantiate is fraud — the supplement industry runs on it and should be regulated accordingly.
If you want to sell a remedy, prove it works in a controlled trial — that's the minimum bar, and if you can't meet it, you're selling hope, not medicine.
Most holistic/natural medicines should not be sold.
When scientific consensus is clear — vaccines work, fluoride is safe — we should respect it; science gives us the best available picture of reality.
Wind and solar go dark when conditions change — reliable baseload power is what a modern economy is built on; ask Texas in February 2021.
We should ramp up renewable energy capacity as soon as possible.
The pandemic exposed how underfunded public schools are — they couldn't get ventilation upgrades, substitute teachers, or rapid tests; that's a resource allocation failure.
Government can't be fired for wasting money and has no incentive to innovate — that's why every government project runs over budget and underperforms.
Half our regulations are paper rules with too few inspectors and too weak penalties — write fewer rules and enforce them better.
The tax code is 75,000 pages by design — complexity protects the bureaucrats; a regulation should be simple enough for a normal person to understand.
From the DMV to the Pentagon, when there's no competition and no accountability, inefficiency and corruption are inevitable outcomes.
Government should be well-resourced.
$35 trillion in debt, 180,000 pages of regulation, agencies not reviewed in decades — Washington is too big, and it's time to cut it down.
Power is self-perpetuating — it always seeks more, and the Constitution's checks exist because the Founders understood this.
Bureaucracies never die — they just grow, hire more people, and find new reasons to justify their existence; not one federal agency has ever been truly abolished.
The federal regulatory code is 180,000 pages, half of it probably contradicting the other half — Congress should repeal two regulations for every new one it adds.
Good governance means limited governance — small, transparent, and accountable, doing only what the Constitution authorizes: defense, courts, basic infrastructure.
The "free market" is a complex legal-institutional construct requiring rules about everything from who owns what to who and for what you can sue.
The free market lifted more people out of poverty in the 20th century than all government programs combined — look at China after Deng, Eastern Europe after 1989. The evidence is not ambiguous.
Wherever government takes over — healthcare, education, housing — costs rise and quality stagnates; the pattern is consistent enough to be a law of nature.
Vestigette app should prioritize tools for sharing more meaningfully to users.
Vestigette app is in an early beta phase.
Vestigette app should prioritize improving the browsing experience of explication links.
Vestigette app should prioritize a visual map of arguments beyond those immediately connected to it.
Vestigette app should prioritize adding search functionality.
Vestigette has major feature gaps to fill.
Vestigette aims to make a discernible map of the discourse.
When submitting a new assertion on Vestigette, search for keywords in your browser to make use of existing arguments whenever possible.
Sufficient clear consensus must eventually carry power.
Vestigette is praxis.
The Democratic Party must enforce political behavioral norms wherever possible.
“Fair play” gives your opponent an opportunity to win.
The GOP has little concern for the common welfare.
The GOP should never be trusted.
Ruthlessness — not cruelty, but willingness to do what it takes — is how power is won and held in politics; playing nice with people who won't return the favor means losing every time.
The GOP acts with ruthlessness.
The GOP is mostly interested in concentrating its own power.
Debate is more concerned with winning than finding the truth.
Debate is bad.
It is more advantageous to use a pre-existing argument on Vestigette that has existing engagement.
Vestigette encourages convergence among many different voices.
Social media is incentivized to increase screen time to delivery more ads.
Social media diminishes all truth if banal enough.
Social media democratizes information by greatly diminishing gatekeepers.
Social media is a positive advancement in communication.
Social media allows users to consume only content they are predisposed to liking.
Vestigette is not social media.
Relationships make social media unique to other media.
Vestigette is social media.
Vestigette is bad for society.
Lack of gatekeepers makes the dialogue over social media chaotic.
Pursuit of greater and greater “engagement” numbers discourages resolution.
Social media's incentive structure is engineered to maximize outrage — and nobody would have built it that way if they'd understood what they were creating.
Vestigette resolves the major problems with polling as a measure of public opinion.
There is guidelines to reopen schools from COVID lockdowns that are scientifically sound.
The health and safety of students, teachers, and staff is paramount for in-person instruction.
Schools are safe to reopen from COVID-19 lockdowns now.
Schools should only reopen from COVID-19 lockdowns once students, teachers, and staff are safe.
Schools should have reopened well before they did — the data on kid-to-adult transmission was thin, and the harm from keeping children home was real and measurable. We made the wrong call.
Students’ long term well-being is at risk the longer COVID-19 lockdowns continue.
Teachers should be prioritized for COVID-19 vaccines to help re-open schools.
Prioritization of vaccine recipients is needed to advance public health goals.
We should have universal vote-by-mail.
We should have universal voter registration.
Voting rights should be expanded and protected.
The government is grossly overrepresented by the GOP
There is no such thing as “reverse-racism”
Racism requires a power differential where the perpetrators hold the advantage.
Black people don’t have the institutional power to be racist.
Black Lives Matter aims to diminish white people.
BLM the organization is explicitly anti-nuclear-family, anti-police, and Marxist — you can care about black lives without supporting that agenda.
There not being a consequence for bad behavior will encourage more bad behavior.
Presidents that encourage an insurrection against the government must not ever hold office again.
Impeach and convict Donald Trump
Earmarks are how politicians buy votes with other people's money — all revenues should go into the general fund with Congress voting on priorities.
If a policy actually works, fund it — regardless of which pot the money comes from. Stop the shell game of moving money around to look busy. What matters is results.
The harm of public policy doing too much to address a problem is usually much less than the harm persisting after too little.
Fifty years of Great Society programs haven't fixed poverty — doing the same thing and expecting a different result isn't persistence, it's ideology.
The COVID relief package (Q1 2021) should be more generous than proposed.
Every time a community defluoridates, decay rates go up — fighting fluoridation isn't protecting public health, it's harming it.
Better dental health reduces systemic infections and long-term healthcare costs — the economic argument for fluoridation is as strong as the public health one.
Local and state health officials broadly agree that 0.7 to 1.5 mg per liter is safe and effective — that's the scientific consensus, not a pharmaceutical conspiracy.
At the approved level of 0.7 mg/L, no credible study has found cognitive effects — the anti-fluoride panic is based on research from regions with fluoride at 4x that concentration.
The correlation between fluoridation and better dental health is documented in studies spanning fifty years across dozens of countries — this isn't a hypothesis.
The militarization of the police presents a moral hazard.
Police and sheriff departments should resist “militarization”.
Assault weapons should be banned for use by non-military purposes.
Served in Vietnam so Americans could stay free. The day U.S. troops are turned against American citizens is the day this Republic dies. Can't allow that.
Gun laws limiting ownership are constitutional.
There's a clear line between personal defense and weapons of mass destruction — nobody serious is arguing for private atom bombs.
There is a certain degree of firepower that should be banned for private ownership.
Second Amendment's been under attack for fifty years. Time to stop giving an inch. Every compromise just opens the door to the next one.
Second Amendment isn't just about hunting. It's about keeping government honest. An armed citizenry is the last check on tyranny — the Founders understood that.
Government doesn't get to tell me how I'm allowed to defend my home. That's what the Second Amendment is about — protection, plain and simple.
The Second Amendment wasn't about hunting — the Founders feared their own government, and an armed citizenry as the ultimate check on tyranny is explicitly what they wrote.
Don't rely on 911 or FEMA — average response time is over 10 minutes and government will let you down when it counts. Be prepared.
Government is run by humans. Humans are fallible, corruptible, and self-interested. Build the system with that assumption, not with the pretense that bureaucrats are noble.
Trusted government once — watched them lie about Vietnam, Watergate, WMDs in Iraq, COVID lab leak. Never again. Skepticism of government isn't paranoia. It's patriotism.
Human influenced climate change is an observable fact.
All people deserve equal treatment under the law, by institutions, and in the marketplace — that's the founding principle of a just society, and it doesn't have a racial asterisk.
Race isn't a good proxy for what genetic diversity does exist across the entire human race.
The genetic diversity that exists across the entire human race is very, very small.
Race is a social construct.
Gender is innate.
A person does not choose their gender
The central question of the abortion debate is when personhood begins — if life begins at conception, personhood begins at conception.
Every person deserves basic dignity and respect. That principle doesn't stop at the womb. The unborn are persons, and they deserve respect and protection under the law.
People expect to be fairly represented.
Speaking about some person or group in an unfair way is likely to elicit a response from that person or member of that group.
Some of the worst - dumbest, irresponsible, harmful - is the most "engaging".
Engagement is a poor measure of speech's value.
Assholes with outsized voices deserve to have those voices diminished.
Algorithms maximized for engagement amplify speech that is provocative.
Provocative speech is more engaging than most sober-minded assertions.
Provocative speech does not deserve to be amplified purely for being provocative.
Words can have multiple facets to their meanings.
Words should have a generally agreed upon meaning.
Describing any criticism as an attempt to "cancel" someone is used to dismiss the criticism before evaluating its validity.
"Canceling" someone means limiting their ability to reach an audience.
"Canceling" someone means diminishing their standing.
Plenty of people deserve to be “canceled”
“Cancel Culture” is a modern form of ostracism aiming to diminish an offender’s standing in a social or professional circle.
“Cancel culture” is an effort promote a conformist viewpoint in line with current liberal norms particularly regarding social issues.
Broad opposition to “Cancel Culture” may add legitimacy to views deserving of greater criticism.
Dismissing criticism as an example of “Cancel Culture” risks chilling useful discussion.
“Cancel Culture” is too vague of a term to be useful.
“Cancel Culture” is merely criticism someone does not support.
People should bot use social networks to invite others to “pile on” a person they believe is deserving of criticism.
Accepting that employers can fire people for private political beliefs hands a totalitarian lever to whichever faction controls HR — that should scare both sides.
Calls for academic boycotts are anathema to free inquiry.
When professors self-censor out of fear of a Twitter mob, science stops working — academic freedom is the operating system for open inquiry, and cancel culture is malware for that system.
Cancel culture is organized intimidation — people lose jobs and reputations for ideological impurity, not actual wrongdoing.
Everything is political.
As views get increasingly more germane to political priorities they should be subject to greater scrutiny.
No individual should suffer harassment or attack based on personal views.
No individual should suffer harassment or attack based on political views.
Claiming your religion demands a particular view or action does not insulate it from criticism.
No individual should suffer harassment or attack based on religion.
No individual should suffer harassment or attack based on nationality
No individual should suffer harassment or attack based on gender.
No individual should suffer harassment or attack based on race.
No individual should suffer harassment or attack based on sexual orientation.
Some projects are better suited to be run by governments than private enterprise.
There is nothing inherent that makes a government enterprise inferior to a private enterprise.
A government operation can't be fired for waste and faces no competitive pressure to innovate — every incentive that makes private enterprises perform is missing, which is why government projects run over budget.
Sandwiches are more flat in shape, and shape is One defining characteristic of a sandwich.
A means test helps avoid criticism that a policy is unneeded.
Means testing needlessly creates opposing interest groups
Public goods should be available to all.
Means tested eligibility will always result in some people deemed eligible that are less deserving than some deemed ineligible.
The standard(s) used for a means test will always be somewhat crude and arbitrary.
A means test requires creating an in-group and out-group.
Means-testing focuses limited government resources on people who actually need them — it's not about creating in-groups; it's about not writing checks to people who don't.
A government check is unearned and other people’s money.
A tax cut returns money to the person who earned it — recognition that government was taking something that belonged to you and is now taking a little less.
Government policy should be judged on the basis of its net effect on one’s wealth.
Medical liberty means you decide whether a vaccine is right for you — not the government.
I was sent a link by someone who works on Vestigette.
The dictionary defines a hot dog as a sandwich.
Circular arguments are a logical fallacy.
Using a dictionary definition as evidence for your argument is inherently a circular argument
Dictionary definitions are terrible evidence for arguments.
Listing a hot dog as a menu item in a “Sandwich” section is wrong.
Hot dogs fit in the sandwich category better than any other category.
It would be rude to cut someone’s hot dog in half without their permission.
It would be odd for someone to cut their hotdog in half.
Sandwiches are often cut in half to be more conveniently enjoyed.
Humans have a natural tendency to categorize things.
There is a commonly understood taxonomy of food.
Any food made by putting fillings between bread is a sandwich
Hoagies are sandwiches made with a roll that is split - not separated
Child sexual abuse by the powerful against the defenseless is a line no money, influence, or political cover can erase — Epstein's full network should be prosecuted regardless of party.
Jeffery Epstein was one person Trump couldn’t get away with pardoning.
White supremacy demands we don’t not live with other groups harmoniously.
The American government brutally banished native Americans from their homes on my occasions.
Humanity can only move forward as one - leaving no one behind.
If we don’t respect one another it will lead to infighting.
Humans must treat each other with fellowship if we are to succeed.
Giving black Americans the power they deserve should be a priority for the country.
The equality of any group treated as less human than another is a priority.
Whiteness is a convenient line to horde power within.
American society is white supremest.
Native Americans are right to feel wronged by American government.
Black Americans are right to feel wronged by society.
Some resentments are righteous.
Black people are the ones that get policed the most.
Show me a stupid billionaire who built it from nothing — you don't accumulate that kind of capital without intelligence, resilience, and real risk tolerance.
Trump built a global real estate empire from a modest starting point through deal-making, hustle, and risk — for every failure, five succeeded. That's entrepreneurship.
Fifty years of Democratic one-party rule produced Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago — they call that progress; I call it managed decline.
Climate change is a hoax perpetuated by academics chasing grant money, politicians chasing control, and corporations chasing subsidies. Real science doesn't silence debate — climate science does.
Government out of our business, out of the economy, out of personal decisions — when Republicans forget that's their mission, they lose, and deserve to.
Every dollar Washington takes out of the private economy is one less dollar invested, hired out, or spent locally — lower taxes mean stronger growth; that's math, not ideology.
Every time taxes went down — Reagan's cuts, Bush's cuts — investment went up; lower taxes mean more money working in the real economy, not in Washington.
Government doesn't grant you rights — you're born with them; the moment you accept 'some' restrictions on freedom, you've opened the floodgates.
GMO research is still a developing field.
The American system has produced more prosperity, freedom, and innovation than any other arrangement in history — you don't have to be naive about the problems to recognize the achievement.
Preventing racial inequality in the justice system should be a priority toward building a just society.
The inequities of the criminal justice system in America are part and parcel of inequities of American society as a whole.
The power structures that maintain white supremacy are most hostile to black people.
Society at large is not outraged to the same degree when a black person is killed as when a white person is killed.
Police are granted qualified immunity.
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.
I don't actually want to use this
White people are more likely to avoid arrest with a warning
Black people are more likely to be falsely identified as the perpetrator by eye witnesses of a crime.
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.
Resentment can be justified.
Too few hold too much power in the world.
Estate taxes are a useful tool for controlling hereditary wealth.
Happiness would be maximized in a more equatable world.
Human achievement can only reach its heighest heights when not limited by access to capital.
Innovation should not be encumbered.
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.
How wealth is distributed should be easily conceptualized.
The distribution of wealth should be smoothly parabolic when charted.
There is no such thing as too much wealth concentration.
Wealth taxes should control offensive levels of wealth.
A moral human could not stand before 1M strangers and express they are worth more than all of them combined.
The point at which wealth inequality becomes offensive is 1:1,000,000
There is a point of wealth inequality SOMEWHERE on the spectrum between total equality and all wealth in the hands of a single person that should be found offensive.
Resentment breeds cynicism.
The people are right to feel resentment toward elites.
Cynics are resentful.
A wealth tax would reduce resentment among people.
Groups that are most historically eploited in society are also systemically disenfranchised from the vote - perpetuating the problem.
Reject mail in voting initiatives.
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.
Voting rights should not be expanded.
American government has grown to large and invasive, Trump has broken it down more effectively than anyone could imagine.
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.
Inherent racial bias has far reaching effects.
The criminal justice is predjudiced today, to not conciously account for racial disparities iin reform is to be blind to it.
The criminal justice system should not be the focus of reform where the goal is racial equality.
For the criminal justice system to account for racial disparities is for it to inherently make it predjudiced.
The criminal justice system is a major contributor to racial inequality as a whole in American society.
The criminal justice system should not adjust to correct for societal inequalities.
Non-white males statistically get paid less to the dollar than white counterparts
Establish a new system, bereft of abuse of prisoners with a more efficient incarceration to trial path
Aboliton of the prison system will cause undue stress to citizens
Policing doesn't need to be changed; rather, the checks and balances oversight of policing should be reformed
Police unions themselves are not racist. Increase funding to police departments focusing on broad cultural sensitivity training and hiring of more people of color
Use resources to fund education on cultural and community values that lead to racism
More policing does not get to the root of the problem causing 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
The idea humans have a soul is inextricably religious.
Joe Biden should choose a black person to be his running mate.
Joe Biden should choose a woman 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 are effectively racist too often.
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
Police should be required to use de-escalation techniques.
Police should be required to use de-escalation techniques.
Ban police from using choke and strangle holds.
Policing in America must be reformed.
Policing in America must be reformed.
Loving who you want causes no justifiable harm
Scripture teaches that the union of man and woman is God's design — I hold that as a matter of faith and won't pretend otherwise to make people comfortable.
There are only two genders.
There must be some reasonable limits on the firepower citizens may legally access.
The second amendment of the US Constitution grants me the right to own whatever firearms I deem necessary.
Trustfund kids and internet billionaires do not deserve the money they have got.
The agreed upon ideal of wealth distribution is this.
The agreed upon ideal of wealth distribution is far less weighted to a vanishing small few.
Capitalism is the best system we got.
At some threshold of taxation, there's no honest word for it other than taking — the government doesn't have a better claim to your income than you do.
We shouldn't punish success.
Anyone claiming to know specifically what they mean by
A supernatural being is inherently beyond anyone's comprehension.
You can't be truly certain of anything.
You can't prove God doesn't exist — treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence is not logic, especially for anything that transcends the physical world.
Having a child should not be put upon someone like a punishment.
Limits on a women's acces to abortion is cruel punishment.
You can't advocate for a fetus without oposing a woman's right to make choices about her own body.
There should be a limit on how far along a pregnancy can be and still be aborted.
Personal responsibility means accepting the consequences of your choices — if a woman becomes pregnant, she has a responsibility to that child, and abortion ends a life to avoid a consequence.
A fetus is a human being with a soul — science tells us there's a unique human life at conception, and faith tells me that life has a soul. You don't get to end that life because it's inconvenient.
We must act on climate change quickly and forcefully.
Trump is not conservative.
The same people who lecture everyone about tolerance couldn't tolerate an election result — Trump exposed the hypocrisy beautifully.
Trump put America first — every other presidency in my lifetime put globalists, the UN, or Wall Street first. He meant it, and that's why I voted for him twice.
Black people are offered worse plea bargins
Black people are inherently less civil
Cash bail perpetuates inequities in the justice system that are disproportionately felt by communities of color
Cash bail criminalizes poverty
White people would commit as much crime as black people if they lived under similar conditions as black people.
Conditions outside of black Americans' control increase the liklihood for crimes to be committed.
Implicit bias skews sentencing
End cash bail.
The degree of wealth inequality in America is beyond acceptable.
Empower black people
Black people just commit more crime.
Defund police departments.
Abolish prison.
Police kill black people with impunity.
Vote for Democrats
Black people are convicted of crimes at a grossly disproportionate rate.
Adjusting outcomes based on race — in either direction — makes justice sighted and biased; that's not a fix, it's a different form of the same problem.
Racism is made up.
No system can be completely fair.
Donald Trump has no taste.
I will vote Joe Biden for president in the 2020 Presidential election.
Donald Trump is too stupid to trust with decision making authority in any capacity.
Donald Trump's singular concern is himself.
Joe Biden is a superior option for President in 2020
Do not vote for a Republican political candidate until major reforms are implemented.
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.
The GOP agenda is bad for America.
Donald Trump tacitly endorses racism.
Donald Trump is not intellectually curious to a stunning degree.
Vestigette may offer an alternative business model for vital journalism and research
Donate time, money and advice to Vestigette.
Vestigette provides a place to adjudicate issues not possible elsewhere
Vestigette should be taken seriously.
Hey this is crazy but here's my number so call me maybe.
Untitled
Untitled
4 more years of the Trump administration is what America needs.
A sandwich must have two slices of bread.
A hotdog is a sandwich.
Contribute to Vestigette
I am unfamiliar with what Vestigette is or does
This is my first visit to Vestigette
I want to learn more about Vestigette
I want to explore what arguments Vestigette has mapped
I need a tutorial on Vestigette basics
Make Vestigette better through thoughtful participation.
I have used Vestigette on multiple occasions
Chiropractors are bullshit
The COVID vaccines went through the full FDA evaluation process — compressed timeline, yes, but no stages skipped, and billions of doses confirm the safety record.
The FDA cannot be trusted to determine the safety of vaccines.
A 3am vaccine appointment is acceptable if it means getting inoculated sooner.
Views should only ever be attacked on the grounds expressed by those views.
Fluoridated water has reduced tooth decay by 25% across all income levels since the 1960s — one of the cheapest, most effective public health interventions ever devised.
Government's been too timid on deregulation for decades. If we've been undershooting free-market reforms, overshoot the correction. Half-measures just slow the decline.
Earmarking revenue guarantees a program gets funded whether it works or not — that's politicians protecting pet projects from scrutiny, not accountability.
If it improves efficiency, COVID-19 vaccine inoculations should be given 24 hours a day.
The Trump administration was involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s death.
TEST ARGUMENT #2
Elizebeth Warren should be President
Distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine must have as few barriers as possible
A tax cut is your money coming back to you — calling it equivalent to a welfare check ignores whose money it was in the first place.
I just learned of Vestigette on Twitter recently
A wealth tax is a critical tool toward societal harmony.
We have fewer heroes than we should.
The position of Jupiter on the day you were born has zero causal mechanism for affecting your personality — if astrology worked, every Scorpio in a city would have the same week.
We should remain skeptical of anything unverified under controlled scientific study.
A hot dog is not a sandwich — the bun is connected at the bottom, making it a pocket, not a sandwich. Words mean things.
Means testing policy proposals generally makes them worse.
TEST ARGUMENT #1
The government couldn't stop NAFTA from shipping jobs overseas or opioids from flooding rural towns — it sure isn't going to protect us from a GMO soybean.
Once the FDA and USDA have checked a GMO variety for real dangers, government's role is done — the rest is between farmers and the market.
GMO crops face more rigorous safety testing than any conventional produce ever did.
GMO should receive more testing before sale.
Thirty years of commercial GMO crops, and not one cancer spike, not one ecological catastrophe — the danger argument is dead.
Running safety tests before scaling a new technology is responsible development — not grounds for keeping it locked in a lab indefinitely.
Once a technology is understood, the next step is deploying it — that's how every agricultural advance from hybrid seed to tractors got adopted.
No test can eliminate every theoretical unknown — at some point you accept the evidence and let farmers use the technology.
Farmers have planted GMO soybeans since 1996 and grocery stores have carried GMO products for decades without incident — let farmers and markets keep making these calls.
Treating GMO crops as permanently under suspicion — provisional approvals, emergency-use restrictions, mandatory labeling — means they never get a fair shot to prove themselves.
We deployed hybrid corn and synthetic fertilizers without complete long-term data — at some point you draw the line and let GMO farming proceed.
Sales of GMOs require additional regulations.
GMOs exhibit a significant enough danger that they should be banned.
GMO’s contain toxins.
You shouldn’t eat GMOs because they are bad for you.
Developing a GMO crop variety takes years of lab work and field trials before a single commercial acre gets planted — that research requires serious capital investment.
GMO crop development costs hundreds of millions of dollars — family farms don't run biotech labs; that's why it's Monsanto, Bayer, and Syngenta doing the research. Not a scandal, just scale.
Seed companies need to recoup R&D investment before funding the next crop — no return, no next drought-resistant variety.
A seed company patenting a GMO crop is protecting years of research investment, the same way a drug company patents a new medicine — that's what makes anyone invest in the next innovation.
Calling GMO food 'toxic' without naming a specific compound, dose, or mechanism is a scare tactic, not science.
GMO technology can have terrible side-effects.
GMOs greatly increase the chances of “super weeds”.
You shouldn’t buy GMO because an increasded market for them could bring about environmental harm.
There is a danger for GMOs leading to species that serve the goals of special interests but diminish the wider needs of humanity.
Terminator seed technology and contractual restrictions already prevent farmers from saving seed — this isn't a conspiracy theory, it's current practice.
Even if there are more benign or benifical applications, a single dangerous application can justify treaties to limit technology to select government agents i.e. nuclear tech
We can rely on our government to implement effective regulation.
Terminator seeds force farmers back to the seed company every planting season — a dependency corporations engineered deliberately.
Terminator seeds make farmers permanent customers of the seed company by engineering dependency into the crop's biology.
Once GMO crop varieties are in widespread commercial use, banning them is physically impossible — pollen crosses state lines and you can't stop cross-pollination in the wind.
Ban GMO crop sales and you push development to China and Brazil with no oversight, while American farmers buy those same seeds on the black market.
You shouldn’t eat GMOs
"Termination seeds" should be banned.
Intellectual property laws need reform.
The current regulatory framework for GMOs is insufficient.
GMO technology can be regulated with approved varieties and monitoring requirements — a blanket ban is a failure to think the problem through.
A troubling application of GMO technology doesn't indict the entire field — just like one bad drug doesn't end all pharmaceutical research.
GMOs regulatory framework is not robust enough to respond to unexpected threats.
GMO regulation must be fixed to support broader societal goals.
Subsidizing private GMO seed patents with public dollars is corporate welfare dressed up as agricultural research policy.
GMO research needs more government support to ensure innovation benefits society
GMO can protect crops vulnerable to climate change.
No other agricultural tool responds to food supply crises as fast as GMO disease resistance and drought tolerance.
Allow GMOs for emergency response only.
When blight or drought threatens a staple food crop, you use every tool available — including GMO varieties that can salvage a harvest before people go without.
Restricting GMO deployment to crisis scenarios kills the R&D pipeline — innovation needs a real commercial market to justify investment.
Thirty years of GMO data shows no cancer spikes, no ecosystem destruction, no poisoned aquifers — apply the standard honestly, and GMO crops pass.