u/CAustin3

Which isn't a bad bet; the Republicans have spent the last 12 years worshipping a joke candidate - a washed-up show business reality TV clown with zero relevant experience or accomplishments - who's only relevant because he flipped off Jeb Bush in a moment when they wanted someone to do that.

But, bad news for Democrats, even when the Republicans set the bar on the fucking FLOOR like that, they're still 1 for 3 against the worst candidate imaginable.

Democrats' current "platform" consists of two categories: fake and irrelevant.

Fake (they pretend to support these issues, but magically fail to deliver even when they control both houses of Congress and the White House):

• Health care reform (slight credit to Obama for managing to enact a watered-down version of Romneycare after campaigning on single-payer)
• Unions and workers (the timing of how Biden did things like bust the railworkers' strike while claiming to be "the most pro-union President ever" makes me think he was either taunting unions deliberately, or was just having another senile moment)
• ^(wearing dresses that say) tax the rich ^(while attending Marie-Antoinette level lavish parties for the rich to suck up to them and accept bribes)

Irrelevant (they don't give a shit about these issues, but they're cheap or free to their corporate donors, so they might as well pretend to care about them if they get the idiots to vote):

• Rainbow shit: light nonsexual flaccid story time for kiddies, if you don't support it yer a bigot!
• Woke shit: your Congressman is PASSIONATELY defending spiritually-questioning Sagitarriuses born on odd-numbered Tuesdays from microaggressive hairstyles! He just hired FIVE of them to serve as advisors!
• Cultural shit: checks updated patch notes: Uh, lesse, whites are bad, browns are good, men are bad, non-men (careful!) are good, Christians are bad, Muslims are good, Asians are kinda good but we should still affirmative-action them, Jewish people are usually good unless we're talking about Israel (in which case they're Nazis). Please read patch notes before each press conference so you don't end up Rowlinged.

Fortunately for Democrats, Republicans are taking this race to the bottom as a serious challenge, and are managing to be even LESS appealing approximately half of the time.

But the first party to pull its head out of its ass and support, like, A relevant issue is going to be winning landslides.

And bad bosses, and bad family members, and bad roommates, et cetera.

Hopefully all or most of them aren't bad, but learning to have to work with, or especially WORK FOR or LEARN FROM, someone you don't get along with, is a crucial skill for success at life.

I'm a high school teacher (math, physics), and first off, most people I've worked with are great. Most people understand that they're not getting into teaching for the money, and they're there for some combination of passion for the subject they teach and compassion for kids and a desire to help bring about a good future in the next generations.

But there are exceptions.

I once worked with a guy who had active contempt for academic subjects (math, reading, history, etc.), and would actively encourage kids to cheat in their academic classes so they wouldn't be put on academic probation and kept out of athletic events. (He was hired at a time when they were somewhat desperate for athletic coaches and would take people they otherwise wouldn't have seriously considered.)

I have worked with a fair number of young earth Creationists. Of these, most understand that they're employees of the state and keep a bit of a barrier between their personal beliefs and their curricula, but a few like to blur that line.

Here's the thing: you WANT your kid to have a teacher like that at some point. Why? Because this is a very useful conversation and learning experience for a kid:

"Hey, Dad, my teacher says the moon is made of cheese!'

"Well, the moon isn't made of cheese."

"I KNEW it! I'm gonna tell her she's a dumb-dumb poo poo head who doesn't know anything!"

"No, you're NOT going to do that. You're going to learn what she has to teach, and respectfully demonstrate your understanding of it on tests and assignments."

"But it's wrong!"

"It is. Demonstrating your ability to learn things, even things you don't agree with, is going to come up all over the place in your adult life, and you're going to start needing that today."

And then perhaps you quietly inform her administration or your school board what's going on, AFTER your daughter has moved on from that class so it doesn't get back to that teacher who might have the lack of professionalism to retaliate on the kid.

But a good parent should WANT their kid to experience things like working for and with people they don't naturally get along with, before they're adults and they run into situations where handling it badly could make or break a career.

To put it first and foremost: the lower and middle classes are getting FUCKED, and should absolutely be paid much, much more.

Over just the last 25 years (to say nothing of the days in the wake of the GI bill and The New Deal), the bottom 50% of earners in the US have almost completely stagnated in real purchasing power, while the top 1% have nearly quadrupled. The US economy has boomed over the last 25 years, but if you're not in the 1% club, that just means you're living in the same country as people who have experienced massive economic growth, but you're not one of them. (Source, source, and source. Warning: some math and reading required.)

A rising tide does NOT lift all boats, when it comes to the US economy. The last 25 years seem like a deliberate experiment in how much you can improve life for the upper classes of a society while absolutely none of it is experienced by the middle and lower classes.

If the lower classes had experienced the same baseline growth as the top 1%, and your state has a $10-15 minimum wage, that would be like if it grew to a $40-60 minimum wage. If that seems ridiculous, all it is is the party you're missing out on - the economic improvement that's the baseline for the upper class.

If you're pounding your fist in anger that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, though, all you're doing is pounding. You need to UNIONIZE. Shareholders, executives, and others who actually get their piece of the pie don't come to the boardroom and tell the company that they've been good boys and deserve a raise. They come and demand what they have, and they're armed with credible threats if their demands aren't met. Workers need to do the same, and if they don't, then that's what causes them to get paid peanuts while the upper classes are rolling in dough.

So why don't we? Why do we unionize at a third to a quarter of the rate that workers unionized 70 years ago? Because we're fucking LAZY, and starting a union takes courage, initiative, persistence, networking, confrontation, and a thousand other things that the Gen Z Stare generation doesn't have. Source: I'm a high school math teacher, and I've watched the dramatic change in the work ethic and basic life capabilities of the average graduate over the last two decades. There are still decent young adults heading into the world, but the quality of the median student has plummeted. (The reasons could be their own entire discussion.)

"If they paid me more, I'd work harder!" No you wouldn't. Your lazy ass would hide in the bathroom and scroll your phone every instant you're not getting babysat by a supervisor whether you were getting paid $7 per hour or $70. And your competent coworker who takes initiative, works every minute of the day when they're on the clock, and proactively solves problems doesn't act like a lazy bum just because they're not getting paid enough.

Unlike you, they ARE actively working on getting better jobs with better pay, by going to school and networking and taking initiative and making things happen, rather than going home and smoking a bowl and scrolling their phone until their next shift.

That's the real reason that better pay gets better work. It's not that the lazy fucks stop being lazy if you pay them enough, it's that the NON-lazy fucks who can choose where they work don't do minimum wage shift work for very long before they move on to bigger and better things.

TL;DR:

• Paying you more wouldn't make you a better worker, but offering better pay for your job might attract a better worker than you to replace you with.
• Workers in general (as in the middle and lower classes) are getting royally fucked, mostly because failing to unionize gives them zero leverage to get their slice of the pie. Broadly speaking, if the poor and middle classes understood just how hard the party was going for the upper classes, and how much they were cut out of it, they'd be rioting in the streets.
• But you won't. Because unionizing takes courage and initiative and being willing to do work beyond the minimum requirements of your job, and so current generations aren't unionizing for the same reason they're not moving out of their moms' basements.

Liberals used to be counterculture. If you're above a certain age (let's say, old enough to have used floppy disks), you remember this.

If you're not, this might be a surprise, but someone on the left saying "I support free speech" wasn't universally followed by the word "but." Sometimes it was honored in phrases like "I disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Could you imagine that coming out of the mouth of a modern liberal? It used to be a standard part of the platform.

Being skeptical and suspicious of pharmaceutical corporations, to the extend of being anti-vaccination, used to be a LEFT-wing fringe, not a right-wing one. Mistaking and conflating drug and tech company profit and legal interests with science (or "The Science") used to be a right-wing fallacy, not a left wing one.

Moral grandstanding, legislating morality and shoving it down the throats of people who don't agree with it, purity tests and inquisitions where questioning a single issue gets you cast out as a blasphemer - there's almost nothing the modern Woke movement (the equity/sexuality/victimhood-based religion-like wing of modern liberalism, for you "define woke" parrots) does in the 2010s and 2020s that isn't directly copying the homework of the Religious Right movement of the 1980s or the McCarthyist movement of the 1950s. That's not counterculture. It's the kind of thought policing and social control movements that counterculture rises up to resist.

So along comes Trump.

Modern liberals have shown, through their actions and their misguided attempts to defeat him, that they fundamentally don't understand why he's being supported. They see, correctly, that he's an openly offensive, rude, corrupt man, and beside that, that he's not particularly intelligent, qualified, successful, or conventionally impressive (other than being rich, if that counts). He's not really a businessman (he managed to run a CASINO bankrupt); his main actual skillset is being walking talking ragebait and using that for reality TV and to prolong his 15 minutes of fame by constantly picking celebrity feuds.

He's not exactly Abraham Lincoln. But where modern liberals make their mistake, is that they think that he's TRYING to be (or that he's trying to be seen that way), or that his supporters think that's what he is.

He's a giant middle finger, deliberately propped up in the oval office, pointing at you. You used to know what that means. Now you're confused by it.

"Oh my heavens, conservatives, look at that! It's a middle finger! Someone has accidentally erected it and left it pointing at me! Why, we have to take it down! It's offensive! That's not a competent president at all!" They know. They did it intentionally. They hate you, and they love the way you freak out over him, and that's why they love him.

"But don't they understand how harmful that is?" Yes. "Well, how dare they?!" (As a side note, seriously, the Greta Thunberg thing? One of modern liberalism's idols is literally someone whose claim to fame is scowling at a room of people and saying "how dare you" like a Victorian aristocrat. These are the people who think they're punk rock rebels.)

You can see how confused they are by how they try to fight him. "He said 'grab em by the pussy!' 'Pussy' is a dirty curse word, and that's offensive to women besides! You must condemn him and replace him with someone more proper immediately!" Lawl. "He used campaign money to pay hush money to a porn star he slept with! That money is supposed to be for corporate interests! That's 4,385,283 felonies - one for every molecule of ink on the accounting ledger!" Rofl. "He's raised the tariffs on the multinational corporations! Doesn't he understand how that will impact Wall Street? They won't be able to trickle down their success on the rest of us!" Remember when we used to protect US labor laws against free trade with sweatshop countries? But we still oppose Reagan in spirit, right?

Liberals turned into pearl-clutching moralizing schoolmarms, and have forgotten counterculture to the extent they don't recognize it when it's standing against them.

If sex ISN'T sacred or meaningful to you, if you don't think ANY body count is 'high' or that body count doesn't matter, fine, but this post isn't for you.

If you're someone who likes to flip your skirt up, bend over, and walk backwards to work in case you run into someone cute or need to say 'hi' to an old coworker, more power to you.

But this is specifically to address people who consider sex to be something you do in a committed, likely permanent relationship. The kind of person who thinks sex should only happen in serious relationships that have built trust and even love.

People like that, who have gained the impression that a body count in the teens or twenties is a normal expectation for someone with standards. If you get your expectations from media or celebrities, this is a common misconception.

So, let's make a hypothetical person who considers sex to be sacred. Not necessarily saving-it-until-marriage sacred, but reserves it for people they know well and/or have fallen in love with and/or realistically expect may become their spouse for life.

An easy litmus test for whether we're talking about the same kind of standards is that a person can easily remember all the people they've had sex with in their life. If you can't do that, and it's not some weird outlier scenario ("I have amnesia, you insensitive jerk!"), be honest with yourself: sex isn't something that's sacred to you, it's something you do for fun when it's convenient.

With this standard, you're not going to be having sex with a new partner more than once every year, and likely not more than once every several years, during your dating/single life. If you're not fourteen, you understand the difference between someone you've been seeing for two weeks and have a crush on, and someone you trust and know well and deeply, and that takes at minimum, months (likely years). Even if you have sex relatively early into a relationship like that, you don't switch to a new partner for a long time.

How long is a typical person like this dating for before settling down? Even with it getting longer with time, most people are settled down with their spouse in their 20s at the latest, if they're not deliberately permanently single or getting into the chronic divorce/remarriage lifestyle. Given that the typical person who places a high standard on sexual relationships ALSO generally isn't getting started early (the kind of person who thinks double-digit body counts are normal is also usually the kind of person who thinks underage sex is normal), this gives an 'active' range of somewhere between 18-24 and 18-30.

Do the math on that, and a typical person with maybe an 8-year sexually active dating life and a new partner every 1-3 years will have somewhere in the range of 2 to 5 sexual partners in their lifetime. Run these numbers to their reasonable extremes, and someone with a 12-year active span and a new partner every 1-2 years might reach 6 to 8 partners by the end of it.

Any more than that, and there's a reason for it. Maybe you had a 2-year wild phase where you fucked anything that moved because it was good for your ego, hanging out in clubs and handing out your number, and you banged 30 people in that time, but have had standards outside of that. Maybe when you say "serious relationships" you mean "I wait until the third Tinder date before I show up naked," and you're with someone new every three weekends as a result. Maybe you're one of those "we didn't technically SAY we were exclusive" types and you have three "serious relationships" at the same time who don't know about each other.

But there's a reason for it, and if you're in the double digits, you almost certainly can't remember the names of all the people you've had sex with. Don't be misled by media culture and celebrities: someone whose body count is 10 or larger (and really, MOST people whose body count is larger than FIVE) isn't someone who reserves it for serious relationships with someone they know and trust.

Obviously this needs some context.

I was looking at another post in another sub that went something like, "my kid's stupid bad teacher is making him apologize to a BULLY! He called the bully a jerk, but that's only because the bully WAS a jerk and called my kid fat! The teacher should be fired and shamed and tarred and feathered, and we need to stop punishing kids who stand up to bullies!"

First off, the teacher doesn't know the situation, doesn't have time to, and shouldn't make time to. This likely took the form of hearing some kid scream "YOU JERK!" somewhere behind her, followed by both of them thundering up to her "TEACHER TEACHER HE CALLED ME A JERK!" "NUH UH NO I DIDN'T HE'S A LIAR AND ALSO I ONLY CALLED HIM THAT CUZ HE CALLED ME A STUPID FAT ASS" "TEACHER TEACHER HE SAID ASS AND ALSO HE'S A LIAR AND I NEVER SAID THAT AND I ONLY SAID THAT BECAUSE HE CALLED ME A-" at which point she sat both of them down to talk about disruptions, getting along, controlling their emotions, honesty, walking away, etc.

If you want an adult following your kid specifically around school so they can make fair and sound rulings on every word that comes out of their mouth, education's going to get a LOT more expensive.

But even if we could have that, we shouldn't. Not every minute of a kid's life should be scrutinized, and not every minor injustice they experience should be arbitrated by an adult authority figure.

When you're an adult, you'll get bullied. It doesn't go away, it doesn't get better, but if you were raised well, YOU get better at managing those situations.

When your buddy gives you a hard time, you don't run to the cops, you just give him a hard time back, or talk to him if he's actually crossed a line.

When the bitch from accounting makes a snide comment about your weight, you publicly call her out and shame her for making shitty inappropriate comments to people.

When your boss grabs your butt and tries to hit on you, you take it seriously, bring it to authority figures, document what happened, and collect allies and witnesses to make sure the authority figures take your side.

When the cracked out hobo in the alley next to the parking lot screams that you're a n*****, you pretend not to hear him and move on so that you don't end up in a knife fight with a cracked out hobo.

Knowing the right way to deal with these things comes from experience. It comes from being called a name as a kid, running to the teacher, and learning that authority figures don't have the time or interest to micromanage name-calling that they can't verify in the first place. It comes from your dumb dad telling you to hit bullies, and learning that in the real world, hitting someone creates a serious situation and trouble for you even if they "deserved it," and even in cases of self-defense - but at least when you did it in middle school, you just got suspended, not arrested.

And obviously, extremely serious situations SHOULD be handled by authority figures, but there's even a lesson in that: if you're being abused, but you don't tell anyone and expect others to just notice and do something about it, they usually don't. More darkly, if you don't prepare well and collect witnesses and evidence, they may not do anything about it because they can't tell who's telling the truth, or just because it's easier to ignore the problem if they can justify ignorance about it.

But childhood bullying, like almost everything in childhood, is experience that goes toward being a well-developed adult. If you didn't get picked on much as a kid, it just means you're not going to be well equipped to handle it when you're picked on as an adult.

Don't get me wrong, they're shitty, entitled, self-important pieces of shit, but the world would be worse in some specific ways without them.

Karens prey on people who are doing things they know are wrong, but rely on most people's conflict avoidance to get away with them. The cashier who's pretending not to notice customers so he can play on his phone, the guy pretending not to notice that a line is forming who's stepping in front of the people who are lining up, the apartment neighbors who won't change a smoke alarm battery or play their music too loud or who stink up the building with their weed habit.

Most people are just going to be annoyed, maybe make some comment about it to their spouse or friends, but aren't going to risk confrontation to do anything about it. But Karen LOVES confrontation. She gets confrontational even when it's not justified, so actually having JUSTIFIED outrage is like Christmas to her.

And that keeps this kind of mild shitbaggery that flourishes when people who are too afraid to call it out in check. Karen herself is a shitbag, but a few Karens around will control a lot more OTHER shitbags. It's kind of like leaving a couple of spiders around your house to control some of the other bugs.

Hey, you all ready for the next No Kings? Everybody grab a pre-made sign and walk in circles until you tire yourself out sticking it to the man! Mine has the Fuck word on it, so you can tell it's authentic and definitely not a corporate organized controlled opposition exercise! Don't stray off the parade path and bother the powerful (that would be terrorism - never forget January 6th!), but you can definitely get your aggression out by trapping cars your terrified neighbors are trying to drive to work and pounding on the hoods and windows! Maybe set a few parked ones on fire - that will make you feel all protest-ey and justice-ey.

Or maybe let's have a General Strike! Everybody call out sick for a three day weekend (eh, maybe not, I might need those sick days later) and tell your kid to skip school (definitely - he was getting too literate anyway!). We're gonna grab the rich by the balls until they meet our demands! ...If we had demands. Maybe we'll come up with some for next time. And by "until they meet our demands" I mean "we're announcing that the 'strike' will end on Saturday." So, skip school and slightly delay your shopping for JUSTICE! Wooo three day weekends!

The thing is, it's not like we don't know how to get things done by massing people in an organized protest. We're just not doing it.

A hundred years ago, we had the Labor Movement. If you think income disparity and the wealthy buying the government is bad now, crack a history book to the mid-Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s. Child labor, company towns with company scrip, "let the buyer beware" rat feces in meatpacking and addictive drugs hidden in candy and tonics, rent a rope to sling yourself over to try to sleep before your next 16-hour shift with no breaks and no weekends. They'd bought both political parties, we couldn't vote our way out of it. What'd we do?

We took their SHIT. Their factories, their offices, the shit they needed to make money and hold power. And not for a three day weekend: we're not giving you your shit back until there's a world outside worth leaving for. They sent their hired guns, the cops, the military to spill our blood, and we spilled theirs back. It wasn't a surprise that they were willing to kill over it, but we were willing to die for it. We didn't give them a choice: meet our demands, or lose what you love most: your money and your power.

We won. When you're enjoying your weekend, or your fair wage, or you get to go home after working 8 hours, or you can trust that you're buying beef and it's not stuffed with as much feces that they think you won't notice or laced with fentanyl to create brand loyalty, when you send your 6-year-old to school to learn to read instead of to die in a coal mine, thank the unionists who fought and died on picket lines for it.

That's one way to do it.

Sixty years ago, a generation did the opposite, using peace rather than force. The Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War protests, the hippies and their environmentalism, they took the opposite strategy. They didn't need to wrench power from the powerful, they needed to convince their fellow countrymen to do the decent thing. Let Black students into good schools, resist patriotic propaganda and be willing to question the war, take the environment seriously.

They did it by being profoundly peaceful: walking into a diner to have lunch, and let their opponents demonstrate their disgusting brutality against the doctor or the priest or the teacher doing what anyone should be allowed to do (anyone white, anyway), let people's own consciences do the work of recognizing what's wrong as the pillars of the community are firehosed and dragged in chains for trying to have the same rights you enjoy. They won hearts and minds by contrasting their decency against their opponents' brutality.

That's another way to do it.

When we try to protest in 2026, though, we've taken the worst of both worlds to such a precision that it seems deliberate. We don't have the balls to use force on the powerful (that's terrorism! We have to play by the rules!), and unfortunately, we seem to lack the discipline not to be a bunch of rioting violent assholes whenever we get together, blocking traffic, beating people up, setting shit on fire. So we don't win hearts and minds, either.

Are we too stupid to recognize and do what works, or are we deliberately self-sabotaging because the whole thing is performative and we're actually too comfortable to want anything to really change?

The left doesn't know what it stands for, and "Trump bad" has been doing a lot of work for them since 2016. Without "Trump bad," they don't have a platform or an identity.

They used to have values, but most of them got deleted by Citizens United back in 2012. They used to stand for healthcare reform, unions, workers' rights, standing against corporate influence and bribery and corruption (let's be honest, that one died long before Citizens United around the NAFTA era in the 90s). Hell, there was a time when they genuinely stood for things like free speech and scientific inquiry, even speech they disagreed with and science that might not support their political agenda.

Anyway, corporate donors don't allow any of that any more. You can't win any major office in US politics, left or right, without massive corporate bribes funneled to you by PACs, or you'll just be fatally out-spent by your opponent. And the corporate bribers aren't going to let you actually support unions or taxes on the rich or limitations on their censorship and speech manipulation. Best you can do is wearing a "tax the rich" dress for a photo op, or explaining to the American public how impossible it is to pass healthcare reform, no matter how much of the government you control.

So, what's the left's platform anymore? They tried making it all about gay rights, but that succeeded too quickly. By 2015, it wasn't controversial anymore. They tried pushing the rainbow agenda in a thousand different bizarre directions, trying to stir up controversy, but the things that managed to strike controversy also made them look ridiculous, and they're mostly backpedaling away from the 2015-era "woke everything" obsession (#MeToo - no due process for men! Really aggressive affirmative action and tokenism! Nonsexual light-dildo-slapping storytime for kiddies!).

But the right handed them a gift in 2016: a lewd, fat, crude, simpleton, washed-up reality TV, walking talking ragebait in the form of Donald Trump. "Trump bad" became their entire platform. Whatever Trump did, they were against it (including, hilariously, when Trump accidentally does traditional left-wing things, like raising trade tariffs, practicing economic protectionism, or opposing pharmaceutical corporations). Whatever Trump didn't like, they were for it. An entire young generation has grown up thinking all of politics is "Trump good" or "Trump bad" and having no idea what a political platform is.

But tragedy is coming for the left in 2028. Trump will have served two terms. They're going to have to campaign against a Vance or a Rubio or, even worse, maybe someone they can't tape Trump's face over. They're going to have to debate Republicans over actual policy, without banking on them accidentally endorsing rape or invading Iran halfway through their sentence. We got a taste of that in the 2024 vice presidential debate: Tim Walz blinking and stammering helplessly while two moderators tried to help him and lob him softballs while Vance danced circles around him, because he didn't actually HAVE a coherent agenda (at least not one he could credibly get by his corporate sponsors).

So, "Trump is going to defy the Constitution and run for a third term!" Yeah, you wish. You'd better get started on figuring out what you stand for other than "Trump bad" - you've got 2 years.

Trump was politics on easy mode for Democrats. He's gross, rude, openly corrupt, and he's just as bought-and-paid-for by corporations as any other post-Citizens-United major US politician, but he's exceptionally incompetent at hiding it.

And the Democrats are 1 for 3 against him.

If they can't beat Trump, they sure as hell can't beat a real candidate. Vance, Rubio, or whoever else the Republicans pull out of a random name generator will wipe the floor with Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris or whoever the Democratic elite will shove down their voters' throats after their usual excuse to not hold a primary or to rig a primary.

Left-wing populists aren't voting for Trump, but they're also not voting for Democratic party elites' empty-suit corporate shill "vote bloo no matter hoo" grinning idiots.

If the Democrats don't learn their lesson and hold an actual primary, nominating a credible populist whose main agenda has to do with CLASS ECONOMICS and not rainbow capitalism or Israel or any other distraction issue the average American doesn't give a shit about while they're watching corporations eat their future, they'll continue to lose. Harder this time, because the Republicans won't have Trump as a millstone around their neck and are free to nominate someone who can speak and think coherently.

Unpopular because most people's reactions to it is to immediately form a strong opinion about the "right" button to press, and then to be annoyed by the meme because they consider it a settled issue where the "wrong" people keep trying to justify their stupidity/callousness/bad logic.

The brilliant thing about it is that it's set up like the Blind Man and the Elephant parable: different people see different things, and what they see says more about them than it does about what they're describing. The difference is, in the case of the elephant, it's actually an elephant (not a rope or a sheet or whatever), while the button thought experiment actually IS the several different things it's described as.

To the red button presser, it's a logic puzzle that is "failed" by people who are bad at logic. Pressing the red button means you live, pressing the blue button means maybe you die unless enough other people also press the blue button. Blue button pressers are lemmings, rushing off to their deaths, whose only hope of survival is if there's enough of them. Smart people press the red button, and if everyone is smart (or enough people are dumb), everyone lives.

To the blue button presser, it's an empathy/selflessness/tragedy-of-the-commons test that can be mass-"failed" by too many selfish people. Pressing the blue button is risking your life to save others, pressing the red button is risking others' lives to save yours. An entire society passes the test if enough of them press the blue button, and if too many people press the red button, a bunch of people (the best people, oh no!) die.

The thing is, both perspectives are factually correct assessments of the situation. Neither analysis has a factual error in it; they are two valid and correct ways to frame the same situation. So which analysis someone chooses tells you about the person, not about the "right" answer to the question. The red button person sees themselves as smart and competent, and sees others as dumb and incompetent and maybe trying to play off stupidity as virtue. The blue button person sees themselves as caring and selfless and virtuous, and sees others as selfish and evil and maybe trying to play off selfishness as virtue.

One of the more interesting "blue button" arguments I've seen recently framed the problem as 101 people, and just after you press the button, you learn that you were the tiebreaker for a society that was split 50-50 beforehand. If you pressed the blue button, everyone lives; if you pressed the red button, 50 people died who would have lived if you'd pressed the blue button. And this is countered by the thought that they were split 51-49 in favor of red beforehand: your 'vote' had no effect, except whether you joined the others to die or not.

But the point is, unlike so many Internet trends of late, it's interesting. New people keep making new arguments, people get really into it because they think they're making important moral statements (it's not a coincidence that the buttons are red and blue, ragebaiting people with existing political division), and it keeps generating things worth reading.

"Never tear down a fence without first learning why it was built." The last 70 years of Western dating culture, and especially the last 10 years, have us tearing down a lot of fences, usually under the assumption that the fences were erected by big ol' meany-heads who just wanted to keep us from walking where we wanted.

To be fair, some of them were. Society's rules are often erected by powerful people protecting their power. But some of them the result of ancient lessons learned the hard way, and we're so confident that the thousands of years of humanity have nothing of value to contribute against our whims that we're about to have to re-learn some of the things humanity learned before we knew how to make bronze.

A century ago in Western culture (really less than that), courtship and dating had expectations that are relaxed or entirely absent today. We expected to be monogamous: to stick with our partner until death do we part. We were expected to court and invest in each other: dating someone wasn't done on a whim, it was a serious effort that involved tangible investments to show a willingness for dedication. We were expected to save ourselves for our partner: to have no sexual activity before marriage. We were expected to make marriages last: to weather arguments and disputes and temptations for the good of the children who depended on us and our future stability.

None of these things were carried out to perfection (it's not like pre-marital sex or adultery or divorce didn't exist before 70 years ago), but the expectations were strong, making deviations the exception rather than the norm. For the average person, it meant that any challenges to these expectations needed to be strongly justified enough to be worth the social stigma that would come from breaking them.

Well, it's 2026! All those rules are for big jerk meany conservatives who just wanna control us! We should do whatever we feel like, all the time! If I'm seeing someone, but someone more attractive flirts with me, I'm switching to the new person, and tough shit for my old partner! If someone else flirts with me, maybe I get with both of them at once! It makes me feel good, that's all that matters! Why are you judging me for my two-digit body count, you're just insecure! Let's tear down all these fences, they're in our way!

Gee, I wonder if anyone's ever done this before?

Let me introduce you to humanity's most ancient societies. Are you an average man? Enjoy dying a virgin. Take up a soldier's life or something where you'll similarly die young so there's less shame in it. (You probably won't actually die a virgin. You'll probably try raping a couple of people. No rules, right - yay! It makes you feel good, and you're physically capable of it, so it must be good! ...right up until the point that the higher-status man who expects that person to be their property gets wind of it, at which point he'll beat the shit out of you, maybe to death. Some fences get erected naturally pretty quickly.)

Are you an average woman? Hey, look at you, hooking up with the local noble or military leader or rich merchant! See, this is why we need to go back to where there's no rules!

...oh, sorry, what was your age again? Twenty-SEVEN? You're a Christmas Cake - a woman over 25, which a surprising number of unrelated societies at different times all agree is the time a woman becomes undesirable and expired. Your decade or two of catfighting with 10 other women for attention in some merchant's harem are over - you've been replaced by younger women.

But you have a kid or two from the rich man, that means he has to take care of you, right? Why are you erecting that FENCE? He doesn't FEEL like supporting his kids, so why would he? Get into prostitution to support yourself and your kids you'll be raising by yourself, or maybe you can entice one of those low-value men to stop raping people and use his meager means to help you raise your kids in exchange for becoming his property. Better be quick, though - if you age up to 30 or 35 or something, not even he'll want you.

At some point, most societies that understood that this kind of chaotic hedonism wasn't good for almost anyone, especially long term, nor society at large, began establishing customs and expectations that restricted what people could do but led to better long-term situations for most people. One of the central ones is marriage: the strong agreement between two people that they would stick with each other, even when better opportunities presented themselves, even when they got old and unattractive, even when that meant having to both pitch in to raise a kid or something. Many others popped up to make marriage stronger, more effective, and more accessible to more people (even those who aren't in the top 1%).

Anyway. This is all academic to me; I was fortunate enough to get into a strong, loving marriage before online dating took over everything, which makes me feel like I caught the last helicopter out of Vietnam sometimes. I wonder how far we'll go back into ancient hedonism before we start re-learning the lessons of the Stone Age.

Left, right, center, anything else; the Trump assassination attempts, Charlie Kirk, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Melissa Hortman, Luigi, George Floyd, JFK, Abraham Lincoln.

"But it was a false flag!" "But he/she deserved it, because their political beliefs were murder!" "But I'm not celebrating it, I'm just not condemning it!" If these things are coming out of you're mouth, you're dangerously unhinged, and this post is about you.

I truly wish this wasn't an unpopular opinion, but it is within the political echo chambers and goblin caves where people talk each other up and get extreme to the point that they think it's normal to celebrate or push for or justify political violence.

So, here's why you, who just got done talking about how Charlie Kirk's widow and children are sluts or that George Floyd deserved it for resisting arrest, should stop celebrating political violence. I'm not going to pretend to appeal to your morality; that's been warped beyond repair if you're arguing against this post. I'm going to appeal to practicality.

Your views are the Truth and the Way and the Light, and your political opponents are abject evil to the point that maybe it's okay to engage in a little violence to make sure they get out of power, right? But here's the thing: political violence gives them MORE power.

Abraham Lincoln. JFK. Heroic American icons, right? Not so much in the days just before their deaths. JFK was generally juggling being perceived as a fuckup with things like the Bay of Pigs and his handling of Russia in general. One grassy knoll later, and suddenly his words are being deified as the driving force behind the US space race, and all but his most staunch opponents are putting him in the same category as the historical greats. As for Lincoln, the first Presidents after the Civil War are regarded by historians as some of the worst in history largely because of how the impossibilities of reconstruction reflected on leaders. That's what Lincoln was setting up to be - right up until some idiot in a theater decided he would be immortalized as the greatest President in US history instead, and that his every word would be treated like gospel by those who followed.

You want your enemies to be martyrs? Because that's what happens to martyrs: they're far more powerful and influential than they would ever be if they died of old age instead.

"But my political enemies aren't martyrs! Everyone thinks Charlie Kirk sucks and that his surviving family are stupid sluts!" "Yeah, everyone knows George Floyd was a crackhead who had it coming!" No, just the people in your echo chambers and goblin caves. Out where there's fresh air, all of these people command far more respect than they would have if they were left alive as some random meme-worthy pundit or random criminal or random protestor or whoever they were. You pissing on their graves might impress your cult friends, but the general public is backing away slowly like you're Alex Jones accusing dead schoolkids of being actors.

So. Stop fucking celebrating political violence. Not for moral reasons, because you don't have morals if you need this talk, but because it damages your political causes and strengthens your opponents.