If pop stars like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift face backlash for staying quiet on Gaza, politicians like Zohran Mamdani and other DSA members should get the exact same scrutiny for staying quiet on Ukraine.

The Democratic Socialist (DSA) organisation which Mamdani is part of and supported by officially opposes sending weapons to Ukraine, opposes sanctions on Russia and criticizes NATO.

One of the main criticisms of Ed Sheeran was that he was vocal on Ukraine but not on Gaza but isn't Mamdani doing the same thing consistently talking about Gaza and Israel but not Ukraine?

With the US administration reducing it's funding to Ukraine, taking a more Pro-Russia stance, and removing Russian sanctions it makes politicians staying silent and remaining in pro-Russian organisations complicit by the standard that people have used with Gaza.

I am open to changing my view if you can show how there isn't a double standard going on.

So let’s say you have an idea, something you’d like to see implemented by the democratically elected government of your country. To get this idea implemented though, you skip the ballot box, and you get violent. Maybe you storm your country’s capitol building, or burn down a bunch of buildings, or set up encampments on a college campus, or you just start killing people who you disagree with. In my opinion, these traits are indicative of bad ideas.

My view is that if you live in a Western democracy in this century and feel the need to use violence to promote your politics, then it means you not only don’t believe your ideas can win at the ballot box, but more globally that your ideas are just stupid. You feel on some level that people who disagree with you are not just people with different beliefs, but fundamentally evil for having disagreed with you, and that violence against them might be acceptable. Try something else basically, that’s stupid.

For our purposes, I’ll use the Economist Democracy Index as the ledger for what countries are and aren’t democracies (so 6+), it’s not a perfect tool, and I’m also open to changing my view on using it at all, but for now I think it’s fine.

My argument rests on two points:

1. Religion is mutable and voluntary. Unlike race, sex, ethnicity, etc., you can easily change your religious affiliation, take it from me, a Catholic turned atheist. Thus if I refuse to vote for someone based on their religion, I’m rejecting them based on what they do not what they are.
2. Religion shapes a candidate’s values, which will impact how they act in office. It’s entirely reasonable to want to be represented by someone who shares your values. If I was a Catholic, it would entirely reasonable for me to want another Catholic representing me in office, because I know that that person will approach problems the way I would (to some degree at least, people of any faith aren’t monolithic). Conversely, let’s say that I’m a gay person who finds Catholic teachings on homosexuality to be so morally repugnant that I would never support a Catholic for public office. That’s perfectly fine. All I’m doing is making a choice based on the candidate’s publicly professed values. Of course discriminating against someone in broader society based on their religion is wrong, but that’s different from denying that person political power.

Edit: I’ve changed my mind, sort of. My view is now that it can be bigoted to vote against someone on the basis of their religion, but it is not necessarily bigoted.

Basically, I think it’s bigotry if you’re expecting a candidate to do something that directly contradicts their espoused positions. So refusing to support a liberal Christian on the basis of “all Christians want to turn this country into Gilead” or refusing to a Hindu on the basis that they will ban hamburgers, when there is no indication that they will do so is wrong. What isn’t bigoted is drawing inferences on how someone might act in an unforeseen situation based off their religion. All elected officials encounter black Swan events or have to deal with new problems during their tenure, and their values will dictate how they respond. As an example, let’s say that my city had a Muslim candidate for mayor. It would be fair for me to refuse to vote for them on the basis that alcohol is Haram and access to alcohol is important to me. A city council member could conceivably introduce a bill to loosen licensing requirements for bars. It would be reasonable to conclude that a Muslim would oppose such a law due to their religious background. What would be hysterical, anti-Muslim prejudice would be if I claimed that a Muslim candidate was going to take everyone’s beer away on day one.

people view age as an indicator of intelligence, maturity and credibility. the older someone is, the more likely people are to assume that they know better, while younger people are expected to prove themselves before their opinions are even taken seriously. which makes NO sense because age and knowledge are not the same thing

for example, if two people were applying for the same job at maybe mcdonald’s, and one of them was 18 while the other was 25, people might automatically assume that the older person has more experience and is therefore the better candidate. maybe they do have more experience, but the 18-year-old isn’t going to be able to gain that experience if they’re never given the opportunity in the first place.

younger people can also go unheard because people assume that they’re young and therefore know nothing. for example, i’ve studied mechanics so if i brought up a possible fault or explained that something could be wrong with a motorbike and someone older who hadn’t studied mechanics said, “no, it’s fine,” people might be more likely to take their word for it simply because they assume that the older person must know better. they think, “they’re older, so they’re probably right,” even though i’m the one who has actually studied the subject.

another thing people do is use age as a way to dismiss someone’s argument instead of actually responding to it. saying, “oh, it checks out that you’re ___,” or pointing out someone’s age in a mocking way it just insulting and summing it up as unworthy and uneducated opinion without explaining why. It’s just an attempt to avoid responding and invalidating everything they have to say.

or when someone can make a perfectly reasonable argument, and instead of addressing the actual point, the response is just, “you’re too young to understand.” understand what, exactly? if there’s something they’re missing, explain it. if their reasoning is flawed, point out the flaw. if they lack relevant experience, explain how that experience changes the situation. there are actual ways to disagree with someone without reducing the entire conversation to how old they are.

Not to mention people constantly use age as an insult when people start making assumptions about intelligence and maturity based on how someone types. the whole “you type like you’re 12” Just because someone types informally, use abbreviations, make spelling mistakes, or using little faces like :b or ^^ like this isn’t a sign of being unintelligent or immature. not everyone wants to write every online message like they’re submitting an academic essay, and someone’s casual typing style doesn’t tell you everything about their ability to think, reason, or communicate.

it’s also worth considering that some people have disabilities or learning difficulties that affect their spelling, grammar, or written communication. mocking someone for the way they write can mean ridiculing something they genuinely struggle with, while making completely unfair assumptions about their intelligence. someone can struggle with spelling or expressing themselves in writing and still be knowledgeable, thoughtful, and mature. the way someone communicates isn’t a reliable measure of how intelligent they are.

i think this all comes back to the wider assumption that being older makes you superior and using words like “kid” or “childish” to imply that someone is stupid, incapable, or not worth listening to it’s pretty harmful when your growing up your treated as unimportant simply because you’re young, you can eventually start believing that what you have to say genuinely doesn’t matter. share your opinions, or trust your own judgement because you’ve been made to feel as though you’re automatically less capable than everyone older than you.

and then when these younger people get the older age they’re gonna think yeah now i’m older I’m more important and it just loops round

you cannot expect younger people to develop confidence in their own thoughts and abilities if you constantly teach them that their voices matter less than those of older people. you cannot encourage them to learn, think critically, and form their own opinions while simultaneously making them feel as though they’re too young for anything they say to be taken seriously. being young should mean having room to learn and grow, not being made to feel as though you’re inherently less intelligent or less valuable than someone who’s been alive longer.

If a child gets pregnant, the cells should automatically be terminated at the hospital. No children should ever bring a fetus full term, it’d be better for everyone involved. Any child who ends up bringing a kid to term should have to give it up or weekly random cps visits and constant involvement. Making child pregnancy illegal would help fix so much(and yes I’m aware making something illegal won’t fully stop it), though complete overhauls of the foster and cps systems also need doing.
I’m aware that plenty of teenage parents have “successfully” raised their children, however more often than not immature parents do incredible harm to their children and they either don’t realize it or don’t care due to their immaturity, which is directly correlated to being a parent while still being a child themselves(regardless of how grown up they think they are.)

This came to me in a dream so please do not take this as seriously as you may want, seeing as it’s a debate sub. Bear with me here.

Would it not be racist to hate lizard people? I mean, think about it. We HAVE intelligent life on the planet, maybe not as resourceful as homo sapiens, buy still very intelligent. We study them and many people have respect in abundance for these creatures, so why should lizard people be any different.

Many people talk about lizard people being heads of governments, political figures and affiliates, artists, many things, but surely if there are lizard people that are taking control of the government, there must be some that operate at lower levels. As above so below. Working class lizards, prostitute lizards, all of that. Are we no different from our lizard folk?

(To clarify since some of you fuckers can’t read a post and be normal for once. Lizard people would be equal to homo sapiens in everything. Intellectual potential, resourcefulness, etc.)

I realize that the title may sound somewhat strange.  What I mean to say is that we often see interactions in online spaces that go something like this:

Person 1 - Why have I been permanently banned from r/WorldNews for suggesting that Palestinians are human beings?  What about free speech?!

Person 2 - Actually free speech only applies to the 1st Amendment.  r/WorldNews has every right to censor people who attempt to suggest that Muslims actually people if they have decided that don’t want that view to be promoted in their own space. 

Or like this?

Person 1 - Why should we be releasing the identity of this person who has only been accused of sexual assault and behaving like we are certain he is guilty?  What about the concept of innocence until guilt is proven?

Person 2 - Innocent until proven guilty only applies in a court of law.  Individuals do not have to assume the innocence of an accused person. 

Now, in each case Person 2 is absolutely correct - the bedrocks of liberalism:  freedom of expression and due process, do not apply to private organizations or individuals, they only restrict the actions of government entities. 

However, what Person 2 is ignoring is that the reason that the United States and other liberal states have enshrined these concepts into the constitutions is because they are in fact, morally just, and they are wise policies - for anybody.  

And Person 2 is ignoring the following key moral principles -

1. If you defend freedom of expression when someone you like is being silenced, you should defend it when someone you despise is being silenced. 

2. If you want people to refrain from condemning you before they know the facts, you should refrain from condemning others before you know the facts. 

3. If your principles disappear when they're inconvenient, you don't really have principles. You have preferences. 

Read on, if you care to. 

Free Speech as a Moral Concept 

In the case of free expression, with a few notable exceptions (fomenting panic, defrauding people, harassment), we should not try to make people shut up just because we do not like what they are saying. 

And that is what is normally at play when we see an attempt to "cancel" a celebrity, to get someone "deplatformed" or to shout down a speaker at a public event.  When we see someone doing this they are essentially saying, "I have decided that what this person is saying is wrong and it upsets me that other people are want to listen to it. Therefore, I will make it as hard as possible for the audience to have the ability to listen to the person they want to hear." 

Isn't that rude? Isn't it presumptuous to decide for other people what opinions are dangerous or what comedy is offensive?  Wouldn't we be better off if we let people judge for themselves what they want to listen to?

I also want to point out that do realize that in the past decade or so defenders of "free speech" have mostly hailed from the right but the concept of promoting free expression and the opposition to it know no ideological bounds.  

To take just two recent examples: conservatives attempted to cancel the children's entertainer Miss Rachel for her support of Palestinian Children and 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick for his opposition to police brutality. 

And this just strengthens my point.  Everyone will have something that they consider to be "dangerous".  It's just their opinion. The right thing to do if a person disagrees is to criticize, but not to attempt to make it difficult or impossible for the speaker to be heard - regardless of one's political beliefs. 

Due Process as a Moral Concept 

My general thesis is even more basic in this case, ask yourself the simple question - if you were accused of a crime that you did not commit, would you want people to assume that you were guilty or innocent?

I think that answer to that question is pretty simple, no?

And I want to say that I understand that it is difficult to impossible to follow this to a tee, but then again most moral imperatives are, right?

Like it would basically be impossible to hear your own child accuse a person of sexual assault and to NOT believe those allegations, right?  And even when we have no personal stake in the  case we do tend to rush to conclusions when we hear that a person has been alleged to have commited a crime, particularly when the crime is brutal. 

But we ought not to.  And what we are seeing today is that some people are making assumptions that an accuser is lying (Cornell 7) or that an accused person must be innocent (Lindsay Clancy) without really knowing all the facts.  These media circus morality plays are a violation of the principle of due process whether you are standing for or against the accused.

The morally correct thing to do is to want the truth. And rooting for a conviction or an acquittal when you don't have all the facts is not just wrong, it's stupid. 

Why would you ever want an innocent person to be punished or for a guilty person to walk free?

Conclusion

I realize that I am talking about theory here when in the real world people have their own reasons to try their best to make someone shut up or to assume that an accused person is innocent or that an accused person is guilty. 

But, I think that sometimes we do lose sight of the fact that we really ought not to do this. We should let a speaker finish what they want to say without trying to shout them down, literally or figuratively. 

We should not jump to conclusions when allegations of any sort are made before we have all of the facts. 

At least this is how I see it. Maybe you can change my mind.

Weve all heard the arguments.

"I didnt exist before i was born and it wasnt a problem"

"Just because i dont want to die doesnt mean im afraid of death"

"Being dead is nothing, why would i be scared of nothing"

And to be clear, im not saying you dont genuinely believe it if you say things like this, im saying youre in denial.

Your primitive reaction to the idea of death/nonexistence isnt something you can use rationality to override. You have the same fear of death keeping you alive that your ancestors did hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The reason why people try to approach it as a rational/intellectual problem is because by abstracting it in that way it feels less personal. You can trick yourself into treating death like universal concept to be understood and not a fundamentally unknowable process youll personally have to go through.

This is actually beared out by the firsthand experience of healthcare workers and therapists of terminally ill people. Its a common phenomenon for someone who thinks they have no fear of death to reassess that after them finding out they have not much time left to live. The whole "no atheists in a foxhole" thing is very common.

Its easy to tell yourself you arent afraid of something when you have you wont have to be faced with it for a long while, the second you have to approach death as a very real immediate thing you wouldnt be human if you werent afraid.

Pregnancy is almost always a choice and having a baby isn’t heroic nor does it entitle you to special treatment by people who don’t know you. I’m happy for you if you’re happy for you, and I will always give up my seat to or otherwise accommodate a *disabled* person, and proactively so, but genuinely, why am I accommodating someone’s personal *choices* by giving up my seat on the train or otherwise making a pregnant person more comfortable at my personal expense?

The choice is a key differentiation point for me on this between pregnant people and truly disabled people. Also, kind of like obesity, pregnancy *can* correlate to disability, but isn’t necessarily so, why should we be assuming pregnant women need to be accommodated simply because they are pregnant?

I think another element at play is that I do hold anti-natalist views and I’m sure it mediates my ability to empathize. I do see people who choose to have children rather than foster or adopt as selfish and narcissistic at worst and slaves to their biological imperative at best (with short-sighted and irresponsible somewhere in the middle), and i don’t believe the world needs more humans in it. That makes it more difficult for me to take up my stake in this particular social contract.

Why do people find this view heartless? Please explain the obligation and why it should be shared by society. What is it equivalent to?

I’m a generally empathetic and compassionate person but I can’t seem to get there on this particular issue and people’s reactions are generally negative to this opinion so I am open to having my view changed.

Also, I am a woman with a uterus and a spouse and have no children, by *choice*.

UPDATES
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ETA 1- This post spurred from another post in the DC subreddit in which a pregnant lady was doing a PSA about people not just getting up as soon as they saw her on the train, even though she had yet to move toward or ask for a seat. So there’s a layer here about whether or not you should proactively assume someone needs an accommodation or if they should be the one burdened to ask for what they need. A lot of the people in these comments are here from that post. And to reiterate what I’ve said elsewhere, i don’t have a problem with people making their own choices about whether or not they see a pregnant person and proactively act to accommodate them, but i don’t agree with it as a social norm and i don’t agree with the way others judge whether or not you are adhering to that norm based on how able bodied YOU look. Thats a very clear part of my post that people keep jumping over.
___
ETA 2: Partly, i think i also reject this presumption of need because I think some of it is rooted in old hetero-normative paternalism and hero/ damsel in distress dynamics that don’t serve women and that I reject more broadly. Women are capable of taking care of themselves and they are capable of asking for help (or a seat) when they need it.
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ETA 3: I think whether or not you look at a pregnant person and see a natural physiological process or a disability determines whether and what kind of response you think is warranted. Pregnancy is generally classified by medical and legal authorities as a natural, physiological process rather than a disease or pathological illness. I don’t think we should be looking at a pregnant person and projecting disability onto them. Not all pregnancies are hard and not all women suffer during pregnancy.
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ETA 4: I know part of my hang up is the fact that i have a non-visible disability and my every day experience is the exact opposite of what people think pregnant women require. All day its people assuming I can do everything because i look able bodied even though im not. Result, no extra kindness no help from strangers, and im the one who gets the stink eye from strangers when i dont get up because im flaring and need the seat when we dont even know if that pregnant person is disabled or incapable in any way. Yet, as a society we’re trained to presume that pregnant women cant take care of themselves or ask for what they need and judge others for whether or not they play the role they think is societally appropriate.
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ETA 5: I wouldn’t necessarily say my view has been changed overall but i do concede that my reasoning related to choices/responsibility is flawed and not a legitimate basis for my view. We’re good on that one. Still Interested in engaging on the other points.

Hello,

As I observe older gen Z, my generation of consumers, which is the current youngest generation of consumers with independant budget (not relying on their parents to buy for them), it seems to me that becasue of heavy exposition during their life (televizion, radio in car, billboards, streaming, youtube, cinema...) they are desensitized to the traditional for of advertizing that commercials and their catchphrases are, and more sensitive to social advertizing which is basically influencing through public personalities like stars, actors, popular internet figures, and hidden advertizing from unnanounced profiles on social media. Even worse, we can develop some direct aversion from the brand we've been overly exposed to, which sometimes can lead to finding the subgroup it owns to avoid them as well.

I consider myself in this category of consumers and could be fooled by advertizing done "discretly" through seemingly normal people discussing on a tech forum for example, blending the advertizing into what seems to be some information about the topic I am researching.

Yet when I try to discuss the topic I often face heavy disagreement from people who thinks it's impossible that some new profile of consumers are not falling for those old types of advertizing, that me, and the others, are still buying because of those commercials we're exposed to.

When I say financial crime sentencing reform, I’m mostly talking about it in regards to harm done to individuals.

I think sentencing should be primarily based on the amount of overall harm that you caused to a person, not the amount you stole. General monetary amounts that dictate sentencing (like <$100,000 with a maximum sentence of x years, $250,000+ with a maximum sentence of x years, etc.) are incredibly regressive, and they give a lot of leniency to people that commit these financial crimes.

For example, let’s say you’re a fraudster and you steal $25,000 from a person that works minimum wage and has been saving up that money for the past 15 years. As a result, they are left homeless, jobless, and are on the bridge of death because of your financial crime. Due to sentencing guidelines, your crime (federally) would only give you a range of 6-12 months in prison. I would argue that the crime you committed would be equivalent to an extreme level of assault (I.e., breaking someone’s limbs and causing permanent physical damage), as it would cause the person lifetime harm, similarly to the aforementioned fraud. An assault like this would warrant an estimated sentencing minimum of 12+ years (this is due to an offense level of 34 for this crime for federal sentencing guidelines).

Essentially, what I am saying is that when sentencing someone, the harm caused to an individual should be taken more into account than it currently is, and sentencing guidelines should be reformed to give much harsher punishments to people and institutions that commit financial crimes against others.