Double_R

You should have said from the get-go that you are one of these Democrats who identifies as socialist

And perhaps you could have said from the get go that you’re an unserious clown not interested in adult level conversations, cause that’s what this is giving right now.

I’ve never in my life identified as a socialist, and I made explicitly clear in my last post that the national debate over the label is itself pretty stupid because it doesn’t address what people are actually disagreeing about in the first place. I would then challenge you to tell us what you think should be done and you don’t have time for that. No, you had time to attack people for believing government has a larger role to play in our economy but no time to address a better path forward. That’s awfully telling.

So, I wouldn't say capitalism is the problem because this system is the most natural for human beings.

The problem with capitalism is something inherent within it. In a capitalistic society, money = power, and basic human nature will always default to using that power to attain even more power. To put it more simply, wealth begets wealth.

Ask yourself a question, why does Walmart have the best prices? Answer: because they have more money, which means they have more power. Because they are such a large retailer they can demand their suppliers to sell them goods for less than they would charge anyone else. Their suppliers can’t afford to lose Walmart cause they’d go out of business, so they have to squeeze themselves to remain employed.

Imagine you have a house for sale, listing price $300k. A buyer comes along and offers you asking price. That buyer now has to apply for a mortgage, which requires inspections, insurance applications, lender approvals, etc. That could take months and possibly get denied leaving you still looking for a buyer. Here comes private equity fund offering you $270k in your bank account tomorrow. What are you likely to do? Most would take the $270. More money equals better purchasing power.

This is why, under any capitalistic system, eventually the wealth within that society will wind up being concentrated amongst a very small few, because the more powerful they get the more power they will be able to attain. And power is largely a zero sum game. Eventually, that gap will become unsustainable and result in economic collapse. The only entity with the power to address this is government. So to claim right off the bat that government intervention has no place is absurd. That collapse is inevitable, government is the only thing left that can stop it.

This doesn’t mean we just give money to the poor and declare our problems solved. It means we need a very serious conservation about not whether government needs to intervene, but what that intervention should look like and how do so while preserving a system that rewards the things we value, like innovation, risk taking and hard work. To dismiss that merely because it falls under a label you’ve been taught to demonize is what’s unserious.

Maybe the ignorance of Americans about the destructiveness of socialism is clouding their mind. Socialism can sound good at the beginning because it promises lot of things for the people, which can be partially true, but when you least expect it, you are fucked.

I find this whole national conversation of socialism vs capitalism to be ridiculous. No, Americans don’t know what the term actually means (otherwise the political right would have already lost its mind over Trump imposing *actual* socialism on us), but that aside, to the extent most Americans are using the term socialism is not an alternative to capitalism, every developed nation on earth is using some combination of the two. The actual debate we’re having is; what level of government intervention in our economy is best?

It’s not a surprise that more and more Americans are looking around right now and saying “a lot more than this”. Because of course they are. The middle class has all but disappeared. The rich continue gobbling up whatever net worth is left to gain. 

Right now one single man owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of the country combined, that’s well over 100 million Americans. You think that’s because they’re all just lazy? No, it’s because there isn’t real opportunity anymore. People pay tens of thousands of dollars and spend years of their lives getting an education just to find a job barely making more than minimum wage. You can dismiss that all you want at the individual level, zooming out and seeing how prevalent these kinds of stories are, something is deeply wrong.

So how about this, rather than creating threads just to attack as dumb and clueless the people falling for the dEmoCRat con with little more than political labels, why don’t you tell us what you would do. How would you fix the economic conditions facing ordinary Americans today?

I'm not sure why you dislike Trump so much. I guess because you're an old Democrat trying to defend your position or because you dislike his manners.

Don’t like his manners… lol ok.

I’m old enough to remember when Barack Obama saluted a marine with a cup of coffee in his hands and the political right lost its mind, leading to an entire week of coverage on Fox News. Let’s not forget that these were the same people who thought it was perfectly legitimate to impeach and remove a president for lying about a blow job.

Fast forward to Trump, who in the wake of recent reports that sailors aboard the US Lincoln had jumped overboard due too the stress of their unusually long deployment said “they haven’t been deployed long enough”. And from the right… crickets. I can’t tell any particular individual that they’re being entirely dishonest when they say they don’t care about the president’s conduct, but zoom out and it’s absurd to take that at face value.

The difference between the left and right when it comes to Trump is that the left judges Trump by the same standards as we judge any president. The right has invented a totally different standard. Every insane thing he does is just Trump being Trump, which they say like it excuses the problem when it in fact is the problem.

But fine, take away his conduct, what are we left with? An administration that is cutting health subsidies for millions of Americans cause we can’t afford it while spending more money terrorizing neighborhoods with their hunt for brown people than most countries spend on their entire military, spending something like a billion dollars a day on a war no one wanted that is making everyday life more unaffordable than ever while piling on top of that with the stupidest tariff strategy we’ve ever seen. This administrations policies have been a failure of historic proportions.

There is no excuse for defending this, and history will regard Trump as the worst president we’ve ever had.

one of three democrats identifies as Socialist

Overwhelmingly, most people do not even know what socialism is. This has been especially perpetuated by the political right that has spent years attacking every policy they don’t like as socialism.

Trump just did what many governments in the world usually do, which is buy a bit of participation in a private company. 

Public ownership of the means of production is the *literal* definition of socialism.

When clicking on the debate tab, it should default to the voting period debates. Most people follow whatever the default is set to, and so I think most end up scrolling through a bunch of debates that aren’t even finished. If we want to increase voting and the quality of what users are reading I think that would be in improvement.

I also think there needs to be a featured debate tab that is used more in a marketing sense. Whether rated through likes or picked by the moderators, there needs to be a way to easily get to the best debates the site has to offer. It would help with new user recruits since prospective members would probably ask themselves first what the quality of debates is like here and also reward hard fought contests.

Excuse me all to hell for expansion.

Expanding on the discussion and strawmanning what someone else argued are two different things.

You most certainly did present poor evidence for the Big Bang.

And around we go.

An analogy designed to highlight a logical principal applicable to the current evidence is not poor evidence, it’s not evidence at all, because it’s not supposed to be.

Do you understand that when you are evaluating evidence, the tool you are using to do so is called logic?

Do you understand that logic transcends substance? In other words, the logic that you apply to one set of facts can be transferred to a different set of facts as a way of testing its validity?

I really don’t think you do.

Your hypocrisy lies in your desire for me to repeat my logically reasoned response to your analogy, again, without you producing a logically reasoned response to my analogy.

There is no reason for me to respond to your analogy when your analogy only served to present a strawman of mine.

Again, if you’re going to criticize an analogy you don’t do so by creating a new analogy. The parts of your analogy that didn’t work are the very parts you added to it. That’s not a response, that’s evasion, and there’s no reason for me to chase you down that rabbit hole.

This isn’t rocket science. my analogy was designed to establish a very simple fact; given minimal observations, we can in fact trace the backwards trajectory of an object. That’s it. That’s all. Everything else you added were just strawman’s you set up so you could knock them down.

It is faith without human witness

Yes or No, are all jury verdicts merely expressions of faith?

If you respond to nothing else I wrote, answer that question.

Really? So, Sherrod Brown, Jason Chaffits, Joe Manchin, were/are old men? In fact, there are 50 members of Congress [House & Senate] who are not…

If you had bothered to read my post you would have recognized that I was talking about the Supreme Court, and them being too old to do the job wasn’t my argument, it was a response to yours.

Thanks for your interest. I diligently proceed through the posts chronologically, so I responded to your Big Bang poor evidence post 46 in my post #74 in which I delineated in chronologically factual event detail precisely the process of you engaging in hypocrisy over analogy presentation instead of you addressing the ball analogy as a contributing debate argument about the Big Bang as a leap of faith.

Let’s recap.

46: My rolling ball analogy

65: My reminder to you about 46

74: Your response to 46

76: My rebuttal to 74

89: Your response to 65, as if 74 came before 65 and as if 76 didn’t exist

You can be forgiven for confusing the chronology, just know that you are the one who’s confused.

Happy to hear your response to 76 if you get around to it.

That's called personally-imposed term limitation, and, at that rate of personal dismissal, there's no need to amend the Constitution to impose term limits.

The reason they almost always leave on their own is because they become too old to do the job effectively and/or would rather live out their final days in peace. That’s really not an argument against term limits.

I agree that we should be insulating justices from political pressure, I also recognize term limits can create another issue; justices using the court to position themselves for ambitions after they leave the court. My biggest issue with lifetime appointments is that creates an incentive to nominate younger judges just so they can affect the courts direction for decades, that needs to be stopped or strongly discouraged somehow. My solution would be to impose a minimum age, say 50 or 55, along with a generous retirement package after say year 15 or 20. Something like that would address most of my issues anyway.

You presented poor evidence for the Big Bang

No, I didn’t. I presented a very simple analogy designed to establish a very simple logical principal; given an object’s speed and path, we can reconstruct that object’s trajectory prior to our initial observation.

Then, in a later post, I expanded with the additional balls to establish that when combining the backwards trajectory of the balls, a source hypothesis, and an experiment to test that hypothesis, you can reach a reasonable conclusion as to what caused the balls to start rolling. That’s not faith.

So no, I didn’t set out to prove the big bang. I set out to prove that your claim - that the evidence for the big bang doesn’t reasonably prove that it occurred - to be based on a complete misunderstanding of how the evidence for it works.

And no, it’s not hypocrisy to expand on my own analogy while criticizing your expansion of my analogy. I wasn’t objecting to the act of you expanding it, I was criticizing the fact that the variables you would later invoke as the basis for the analogy collapsing, were your own variables that you injected into it and which had nothing to do with my point. If you’re going to attack my point, do so by responding to what I actually said.

And no, your demonstration of the fact that my initial rolling ball analogy requires that someone (you forgot to include the possibility that some thing) started the ball rolling doesn’t refute anything I said because figuring out what that someone or something was takes further work. In logic, we address one proposition at a time. You are demanding that we address multiple propositions simultaneously and claiming victory when we attempt to show you that this isn’t how logic works.

So now let’s run this test again. Were you listening in good faith? Demonstrate this by answering the following questions which you have thus far avoided:

Q1: Can you deduce the backwards path in which that ball rolled prior to your initial observation at point A?

Q2: Can you calculate where in that path the ball would have been 5 seconds earlier given that you have observed both its path and its speed?

Once you address these two simple questions, then we can move the conversation forward instead of me having to explain to you what words mean.

In those 101 years, Those blinde3d morons lived to regret their soft-shoe dance. Just like yours.

We don’t need 101 year old references, we’ve already lived through a major soft pedaling event historians will be writing about for centuries… the rise of Trump. And folks like us will continue to warn people about the danger he represents till he’s out of office for good.

I've been warning since 1966.

And yet when we talk about the guy who’s actually in power right now and destroying the fabric of our country right now you accuse us of allowing him to live rent free in our heads. I smell hypocrisy.

Fauxlaw's obsession is a hopelessly uninformed attempt to characterize Democrats by equating them with this extremely fringe group.

This has been their playbook for years. Immigrants, trans people, socialists communists marxists… it’s what happens when you have nothing to offer. The republican ethos of governing is fundamentally anti government, so running on making people’s lives better by actually doing things would be incoherent. The only option they have is to paint their political adversaries as enemies of the country so that they can’t paint themselves as the defenders of freedom. It’s pathetic, but it sadly works. We are a country of oversized amigdulas.

Those on the right will of course say the same thing about us, but there’s a big difference; when they attack our extremism they have to resort to going after Billy Bob on Twitter, when we attack their extremism we’re pointing the Oval Office and prominent members of Congress. Not the same thing.

The DSA is living rent free in your head. Why can’t you just ignore them?

Any responses to post 46?

Looks like even ChatGPT agrees with me.

This is what happens when you have no reading comprehension. ChatGPT is feeding your conclusion back to you because you fed it your own misunderstanding of what was presented.

The analogy wasn’t constructed to demonstrate how to determine the starting point, it was constructed to demonstrate how one can, using elementary school level math, determine the backwards trajectory of an object with nothing other than the speed and the path in which that object was moving. A concept you clearly have yet to grasp.

Determining the actual starting point requires further steps, which I went through in detail, but naturally you didn’t bother to read or absorb any of it. You’re doing what low IQ science deniers always do; you demand complex problems be solved with simple solutions, then when those simple solutions fail, proclaim that we can’t know anything. Well the rest of us can, that’s why men have walked on the moon, so sorry to leave you behind.

I could go on about variables related to Double_R’s scenario

You could, but that would be pointless since those variables were your invention, having nothing to do with the analogy you were presented with.

Focus.

A ball is rolling, first observed at point A, moving at 5 mph towards point B.

Q1: Can you deduce the backwards path in which that ball rolled prior to your initial observation at point A?

Q2: Can you calculate where in that path the ball would have been 5 seconds earlier given that you have observed both its path and its speed?

These aren’t trick questions, nor are they rocket science. All you have to do is go back to fourth grade. I believe in you.

You confused human observation (rolling ball) with the absence of human observation (Big Bang).

The question I asked you was whether your observation, and the information you can easily extract from it (such as its speed and direction), can be put together to determine its path before your observation began.

The answer is common sense.

No, because you dont know the starting point. Just because a ball moves in a straight line at speed of 5 meters per second, doesnt mean it was moving in that straight line for 13 billion years before it reached me.

I didn’t ask you anything about where the ball was 13 billion years prior. You are taking a simple analogy presented to make a simple point, and refuting it in the basis that it doesn’t solve all of big bang cosmology in one sentence.

You either have the capacity of a gold fish, or you are being very dishonest.

The analogy made a very simple point; with a relatively small amount of information, you can trace occurrences backward to reconstruct the events which lead up to it. This is what every investigator of anything that has ever been ingratiated does for a living.

If given the speed and direction of the ball, you traced it backward by simply reversing course, and you found that directly in it’s backwards path was a possible source of the ball’s trajectory, would you not conclude that the source you identified was likely where the trajectory of the ball originated?

The answer there is obvious, by the way.

Now add to the analogy, imagine you discovered that there were 7 other balls also rolling in different directions and speeds, and when you performed the same exercise on them you discovered that the speed and trajectory all trace back to the same source as the ball you originally investigated. Would you not conclude that the source was responsible for the trajectory of every ball, or would you still argue that we have no idea what caused the balls to start rolling?

Now imagine that you decided to test your source explanation by figuring out what would also be true of the source was in fact responsible. Say you concluded that air pressure of some kind caused it to explode which sent the balls rolling. You concluded this with nothing but math. You then seek to investigate what other traces this explosion would leave behind, like shrapnel for example. You draw up exactly what that shrapnel would have looked like. You then search and find shrapnel exactly as you predicted laid out in exactly the places your calculations predicted. Would you then still claim the explanation presented to be a leap of faith?

So it's fake science. You cannot go back in time.

If a ball rolls across your foot and you noted what direction it was moving in and what speed it was moving, would you not be able to tell where it was 5 seconds before you first saw it?

Can any of you scientists rationally explain away this postulate as wrong?

You didn’t provide anything for us to refute, all you did was equate scientific findings with faith while providing no reason to justify such categorization.

Do you know where the big bang theory came from? Do you know why the scientific community accepts it? Do you understand the difference between arriving at conclusions via the scientific method, and faith?

Perhaps if you give us something to work with other than vague assertions we can help you understand where we’re coming from.

lol

Says the guy who’s on his 10th post about an advocacy group that has no governing power.

Biology: the science of life. You CANNOT choose to change your personal XY chromosome in the 23rd of that series of 23 to XX. Never, no how, no way, because every one of your trillion cells needs to make that exchange, and, sorry, genius, but you cannot and will not do that by choice. No surgeon in the world can do it. Do it yourself? Go ahead, try. Maybe you are confusing sex with gender? But, even though "gender" in 2026, is being called a "social construct," with the exception of a slim [estimated] 0.00018 x 8 billion of us are NOT XX or XY, but intersex. And that is still a biological, not a social condition, so, again, biology is at work here, not your choices. And merely changing one's genitals does not change the 1x10^12 cells in your body, so you are still, in the massive majority of us, man or woman. By biology. Choose to be a woman? Go ahead, wear a dress, raise your voice, or even chop of your member, but that is a head trip, only.

All you had to do was read the second half of the paragraph and you could have spared is both of this massive waste of a post. But that's what happens when you don't read because you're not actually interested in understanding alternative viewpoints.

Oh, but I have lots to say about democratic socialism and their missive platform.

Great, I'd love to engage in that conversion... In another thread where it's appropriate, not when being deployed as an obvious attempt to run away from your previous point.

Anyone is more likely to turn a blind eye for person they like.

Yes, it's basic human nature. But when it's pointed out to you that you're being a raging hypocrite and your response is not to address the obvious double standard and instead double down (or run away...), then you've shown yourself to be someone who doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.

"Blue, no matter who" is actually more advertised than the counterfactual.

Blue no matter who is a response to the depths of the current republican party, not a blanket declaration of party affiliation in a vacuum.

That aside, my comment regarding Fauxlaw wasn't exclusive towards the right.

The issue isn't that we have different beliefs regarding what acceptable behavior looks like, it's that many (like Fauxlaw here) determine whether behavior is acceptable based on whether the individual engaging in it has a D or an R next to their name. That's a totally different thing.

Why do Rs need to ditch Trump?

For the same reason you fully believed democrats should ditch Platner. But that would be assuming you apply the same standards to both parties, so nevermind.

Perhaps you're more in line with the Democratic Socialists of America, who propose abolishing the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. That's 43% of the Constitution. Fair enough?

So now we're talking about Democratic socialists?

If you find yourself being cornered you can just not reply, you don't have to embarrass yourself any further.

Biology isn't a matter of choice, boys and girls.

That depends on what you're referring to. If by biology you mean a person's genitals, that is in fact a choice here in 2026. If you're referring to a person's chromosomes, then since I've never heard of a person going into surgery to switch their chromosomes to xx, I really don't know what your point is.