LiberalRetvrn

LiberalRetvrn 23hr ago

He doesn't have the kind of dementia where you forget your kids' names, but he obviously has severe cognitive decline relative to any old video of him talking. He's settling further into routinized thought as his mental plasticity disappears. His perception of the world is now filtered through a few basic ideas that are now hard-wired into his brain: trade deficit BAD, media LIARS, deport the illegals. He's not capable of moderating his ideas or taking account how context has changed since he first had these thoughts in the 80s. Which doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong. Old people with fixed beliefs can sometimes provide a useful perspective. The issue is with letting him unilaterally make horrible policy decisions in domains where details matter, like trade. Biden's dementia wasn't a big issue, because he surrounded himself with trusted advisors who helped him make the actual policy.

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LiberalRetvrn 4d ago

Well I think being untestable and unfalsifiable is a pretty big component of all religions. One has to believe in the religion even if there's no evidence. If there were evidence, anyone could believe it, and the true faithful wouldn't be doing anything very impressive or unique.

https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/miraculous-healings/

Is this random list of names supposed to convince me of something?

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LiberalRetvrn 4d ago

healing the sick and raising the dead and multiplying food

Well if he actually did magic and people took videos of it on their cell phones, there wouldn't be any faith required. At that point it wouldn't really be a religion anymore.

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LiberalRetvrn 5d ago

Interesting, though that seems like a very abstract distinction, and not something that really contradicts what I said. From my point of view, Jesus was just a guy who claims to know everything about how the universe works. If a guy like that appeared in 2025, we would call him mentally ill.

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LiberalRetvrn 5d ago

Of course my culture isn't the same as pre-christian Europe, but it's also very different from Christian Europe. I obviously have no intention of becoming a pagan, I'm just pointing out that it's pretty arbitrary to define some specific point in time as "traditional", especially when we can trace back before those traditions even existed. I find the idea of "traditional christianity" especially ironic because christianity at one point was an attempt at rejecting existing culture and replacing it with one true globalist religion.

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LiberalRetvrn 5d ago

I meant that nobody takes the bible literally either. Or at least, very few people. My grandfather believed literally every word of the bible, he would argue endlessly about evidence for the dinosaurs co-existing with jesus, finding the wreckage of the Ark, which day God rested after creating the heavens and Earth, etc. But that seems to be a rare breed of christian these days. I've even heard of christians who believe in evolution and the big bang. If the bible can be stretched that far, so can pagan traditions to make them more compatible with modernism.

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LiberalRetvrn 5d ago

It's interesting, while reading that list of beliefs I couldn't help thinking how much of that has permeated so thoroughly into western culture. Maybe retvrning to paganism would provide spiritual comfort to the type of men who are drawn to glorious battle, and don't want to grow old. Christianity tells us that suicide is wrong, even if you're too old to enjoy life, but so many people intuitively seem to feel otherwise.

I don't really see how these pagan beliefs are more outlandish than anything in the Bible, if taken literally.

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LiberalRetvrn 5d ago

So our ancestors who believed in multiple gods weren't wrong?

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LiberalRetvrn 5d ago

Well it depends how far back you go. White Americans came from somewhere, and there were plenty of European traditions before Christianity displaced or co-opted them. Returning to the "tradition" of Christianity seems a little unsatisfying, considering that it's really a generic set of traditions that are practiced by Christians all over the world, rather than something unique and local to a particular culture. It seems like the idea of traditionalism is that "our ancestors were right." Christianity says that our ancestors were all wrong, for thousands of years, and then a guy in the middle east figured out the truth, and from that point on it's been a steady march toward enlightenment as the Truth is spread throughout the world. That seems like the antithesis of tradition.

-3

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LiberalRetvrn 5d ago

I find myself questioning 40 years of staunch atheism by the fruits it's bore

What fruits did you expect not believing in a god to bear? This seems like a strange reason to change one's belief in the nature of reality. I don't think god exists, but I don't expect to gain anything from that belief. I just know that life is meaningless and we're all just atoms, and nothing happens after we die. Whether I benefit from that or not is irrelevant, it's just how I think things are.

ready to try to retvrn and believe in Christ

Since you're choosing to believe, why not retvrn a little farther and believe in your culture's traditional religions? Unless you're actually from the middle east, that is.

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LiberalRetvrn 10d ago

Does that include the freedom to describe the world accurately, for example, by describing the Wachowski brothers as brothers?

Yes, that would be free speech.

Or the freedom for a woman to get undressed without a man watching?

I think we should try to arrange things so that everyone can have privacy when getting undressed. So yes, I agree with this as a special case of a general policy.

The freedom for women to compete in sporting competitions amongst themselves without being outcompeted by physically superior men.

Well, people should be able to freely associate, meaning that if they want to hold a sports event for only biological females, that should be allowed. I don't think they should necessarily receive federal funding for events that discriminate based on sex, however. If the government is going to fund sports, I think everyone should have an equal chance to participate. Which obviously does not mean that everyone will have an equal chance at winning. Sports are not fair, and being female is just one of the many ways someone can be disadvantaged. Why should that be singled out?

and to dress as the opposite sex if they wanted

Not always, there have been laws against crossdressing in many countries. The US has progressed past this, but some countries still haven't.

surely we should weigh the freedom of the majority more

I view freedom as absolute, so there should be no weighing involved. I would only describe something as a freedom if everyone can have an absolute right to it. Everyone can have an absolute right to free speech, but it's not possible for everyone to have an absolute right to food or healthcare.

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LiberalRetvrn 10d ago

Well I believe that everyone should have absolute free speech and absolute bodily autonomy. What rights am I infringing on by wanting the government not to give people with certain chromosomes special privileges?

-6

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LiberalRetvrn 10d ago

The words woman and man have always meant male and female adults

Well that's fine, but I'm talking about how things should be, not how they are. People should be allowed to choose their gender, because more freedom is better than less freedom. Having separate words for talking about biological sex and gender is useful.

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LiberalRetvrn 10d ago

Well as a white middle class progressive living in coastal north America, I primarily care about how this issue affects that demographic. Lower class black regressive muslims living in the desert can define gender however they want, as long as it doesn't infringe on my rights. Then everyone can decide which culture they would rather live in, and everyone can be happy.

-6

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LiberalRetvrn 10d ago

Defining the word "woman" based on biological sex is just redundant and makes it harder to discuss things. We already have the words "female" and "male" to describe biological sex. If the government insists on giving special privileges to "women", then anyone should be able to identify as a "woman" if they want to. In fact, I think feminists use the word "woman" instead of "female" to somewhat soften their policy positions. Giving special quotas and handouts to females would be more blatantly discriminatory, since natal sex is an inherent characteristic. And saying that "males are trash" would be a lot more obviously hateful than "men are trash", since the word "man" refers more to an abstract social construct than something people are born with.

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LiberalRetvrn 16d ago

Of course cutting Medicare would be a terrible idea, the point is that you can't cut the federal budget significantly by only going after things nobody cares about. The republicans have been doing this exercise of thinking up some ridiculous thing the government is tangentially "funding" (sex change surgeries for underwater feminist studies basket weavers in Burundi) for as long as I can remember. It's a silly talking point and everyone should see though it. But at least the Tea Party republicans didn't follow through by indiscriminately cutting everything. They had the decency to lie to their voters and maintain the status quo once they reached office.

No, they were explicitly what the people asked for - an end to stupid frivolous spending.

Not all the people. I proudly made the correct vote in 2024. I warned my coworkers and anyone who would listen that tariffs would be a disaster. It's not our fault that 51% of the people in certain states made a dumb choice.

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LiberalRetvrn 16d ago

What is the argument for the need to make a choice?

I think setting a precedent against hostage-taking and indiscriminate killing at music festivals is a good idea. I don't necessarily think the US should take sides in the object-level issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I don't like Palestine getting away with doing a terrorist attack and then successfully reframing itself as the victim within a matter of days, like what seemed to happen after October 7th. Obviously what's happening to the Palestinians now is awful, but they brought it upon themselves. It's a natural consequence of their actions in choosing Hamas as their government. If someone is going to suffer for that choice, it should be the Palestinians, not people in surrounding countries.

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LiberalRetvrn 16d ago

Judges should always be have the authority to override the government in favor of individual freedoms. A few gang members being on the loose is nothing compared to the threat of a tyrannical government. Far from a blackpill, rulings like this give me some hope that checks and balances will actually work in practice.

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LiberalRetvrn 16d ago

Israel is a racial supremacist national socialist theocratic state, but they are still better than the palestinians. It's not an issue I particularly care about in either direction, but I don't understand people who aren't willing to choose the lesser of two evils. Any reasonable country in Israel's position would react similarly. If a neighboring country sent terrorists into my country, indiscriminately killed 1000 innocent people and took hostages, I would want them flattened. Israel has held back to an impressive degree. I think the fact that these attacks have been a net positive for Palestine's image is very scary. I don't want to see their behavior rewarded.

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LiberalRetvrn 18d ago

The analogy to diversity and equity programs is a very good one. Tariffs are basically affirmative action for American companies to compete with foreign ones. Why we would want to compete with China in industries like textile manufacturing and lithium mining is beyond me, but it's clear that deviating from the natural order of things under free trade is going to lower the total efficiency of the market, in exchange for whatever intangible value we place in having American-made goods.

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LiberalRetvrn 22d ago

I admit, I put as little effort into coming up with that number as Trump did when deciding the tariff rates. I'm not sure anyone can predict all the feedback loops and unexpected incentives that will be created by such extreme meddling in the economy. Regardless of the exact numbers, we are doomed. It's over.

-5

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LiberalRetvrn 22d ago

Our best hope is for congress to come together and pass a bill that takes the power to impose tariffs away from the president. This actually seems plausible now, since if the tariffs stay in place the democrats will obviously win landslide elections in 2026 and 2028. Republicans no longer have to worry about fitting into the Trump brand.

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LiberalRetvrn 22d ago

Right, and if we wait for them to reach our doorstep, they will be much more powerful and our soldiers will have to do the fighting, rather than Ukrainians. All we have to do right now is spend a few tens of billions and let Ukrainian heroes on the other side of the world do the dirty work for us. It's a huge bargain.

-5

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LiberalRetvrn 22d ago

No diplomatic effort could have prevented a Russian invasion. Nobody is choosing to be in a proxy war with Russia, we are at war with them whether we like it or not. We can either put in the (extremely minimal) effort required to defeat them now, or fight them later after they've seized more territory.

Either way, it's laughable that we're talking about an issue that has literally zero effect on the average American in the same context as tariffs that will raise prices on everything by at least 30%.

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