Idiocracy featured a society of people with cognitive impairments who watered their crops with a sports drink. The economy depends on sale of sports drink. When Joe suggested that they switch to water, the economy went into a crisis before the crops grew back. The movie made an argument for eugenics

But our own society, run by typically functioning people, and even people with above average cognition, also waters our crops with sports drinks. We do, absurd and counter productive things for the sake of preserving jobs in industries that shouldn't exist.

We insist on employer based health insurance rather than single payer despite it being cheaper and better to protect the employment of medical billers and health insurance sales people. Attempts to switch to single payer or public option are met by panic, accusations of socialism, death panels, and the spectre of your grand mother being euthanized by a government bureaucrat.

The system never gets a chance to work and if we did switch, yeah, in the short term there would be painful adjustments but we're can't keep watering our crops with sports drinks just so insurance billers remain employed.

I feel the same way about liberal gun laws I'm there face of mass shootings and youth gang violence, or replacing passenger trains with polluting cars and aircraft and not adopting high speed rail.

"Stupid people" aren't the problem, it's group think, hubris, inertia, selfishness and greed. "Stupid people" didn't give us employer based healthcare, the 2nd amendment, qualified immunity for police, or deregulate Wall Street.

"Stupid people" didn't even give us Donald Trump. It was white racists, xenophobes, Christian nationalists, and the electoral college system. We should do a lot less demonization of "stupid people" and a lot more self-reflection about how systems reward and punish things.

While there is a real problem with children being enslaved for sex, human trafficking is a moral panic with an abundance of misinformation. Right-wing responses to it actually make it worse. Discourse is flooded with counterproductive conspiracy theories.

In short, my problem is that this movie, Sound of Freedom, looks like it was meant to appeal to Qanon believers

Human trafficking is a problematic term. It encompasses multiple issues that are completely unrelated to each other. It includes, kidnapping, sexual slavery, but also smuggling refugees and migrants across borders. It's become a moral panic with an abundance of misinformation

If someone is accused of human trafficking and you don't know anything else, what did they do? They could have been rescuing drowning migrants from the Mediterranean or they could have been doing what Epstein did. It describes too many things

There is nothing sexist about disbelief in astrology. The fact that women believe in it more just means that it is a dangerous lie that preys on women. Astrology is for suckers. It's not harmless. People make bets on financial markets, end relationships, or dangerously time births. Outside of middle-class white girls, it does real harm to communities that have been scammed by astrologers. Hindu Nationalists want to teach astrology as fact the way that Christian Nationalists want to teach creationism as fact.

If you believe in astrology, you're a dupe. You've been scammed. It shouldn't even be printed in newspapers.

The news media seems to be willing to air the arguments of the writers, by having actual writers on to talk about the strike and those conditions.

What frustrates me is that this perspective was absent from the media when it came to the rail worker strike. All we had were pencil-necked economists with glasses talking about the impact on the economy during Christmas and virtually no representation from the workers.

I suspect that the double standard is related to the closeness to power. The railway workers live in the country where the journalists don't live while the writers are friends with journalists and live in the cities with them. There's also prejudice against blue-collar workers.

Conservatives cannot adequately define "woke" because it is a snarl word subject to a moral panic. Therefore it lacks a fixed definition. Most definitions in general, outside of mathematics are family resemblances anyway. But "Woke" used to have a fixed definition and positive connotation but that changed upon becoming a right-wing snarl word. It was a sense of awareness of systemic injustices. Its denotation and connotation have changed.

But now because of chuds and gammons appropriating this perfectly good word from African American vernacular, "woke" means anything from The Little Mermaid being played by a Black woman to not blocking the parking lot charging stations with my gas-guzzling light truck. Environmentalism is "woke," but so are no-smoking signs, reading evidence-based history books, Red Starbucks cups, soy-milk, or whatever conservatives hate this week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YLzcNHfn38

This story got under my skin. That is a traumatic event and it happens to a lot of LGBTQ kids too. It is child abuse and should be regarded as a criminal act. Disinheriting a child because they don't believe your preferred superstition and won't go along with your right-wing ideology, educationally neglecting them to keep their ideas pure, is child abuse. It should be a crime.

Christianity is a destructive, evil ideology from the dark ages that should be abandoned and not embraced. It is a false belief. Your cool church where the pastor is a lesbian with a nose ring and a mohawk is not what #Christianity is to most people and bringing up #notallChristians in #leftists or #queer spaces is not welcome. American Christianity is full of fascists. It's not materialism. It's a lie.

Yeah, I know Martin Luther King Jr was a preacher. I don't care. Most Christians are fascists or scammers these days. Some of them are Black like Creflo Dollar. The Black church cannot be trusted either. They have molesters and homophobes too. They beg for private jets while their congregation lives in poverty.

Christianity should not be redeemed by radicals or liberation theologians. It must be destroyed.

Not everyone who believes in God is reactionary but believing in God is a reactionary belief. It's false. In practice, Christians are reactionary more often than they are not and not wanting Jesus shit in our spaces is completely valid given all the horrors they inflict on queer folks. Respectfully, for some of us God, Jesus, and the church being back horrific memories and present-day oppression. You shouldn't discount that as mere fedora tipping. Christianity is the boot on our neck and I'd see it die out than redeem it because of a tiny number of cool preachers.

I say this as someone who tried. I tried so hard to give it another chance not long after I came out. But the genocidal campaigns against us completely soured me as they are all rooted in the same false belief. When you look at who is behind these campaigns, it is always the church. During my phase of being a Christian, my Dad died and I wanted to visit a church down in Florida because it just happened to be Ash Wednesday. Down there, there were no "good" churches, it was all hellfire and homophobia.

Because that is true Christianity. That is why most Christians are fascists. It is a backward and reactionary belief system for traditionalists and authoritarians. To say otherwise is real revisionism, not liberation theology or other attempts to squeeze round pegs into square holes.

Also, where was God when Florida's laws drove me from the state? Hell, where was God during the Holocaust? There is no God, end of story. We live in a dark, vast, and uncaring universe. And I'll be glad when I'm dead. That's it. God is fake. It's false hope, false consciousness. We need a revolutionary consciousness, not distractions and lies. Those are the justifications for xenophobia, transphobia, and genocide.