guesswho
8mo ago
I suspect there's literally no way I can phrase this that the mods will approve of, but I think it's actually an important point to make so I will say it plainly:
This comment is a pitch-perfect example of the type rightist whining we've been putting up with for years. I can assure you it is indeed very annoying.
guesswho
8mo ago
If you live most of your life surrounded by leftists and consuming leftist media, then of course leftist whining is the type of whining that is most annoying to you.
As someone with Republican relatives and in-laws, I assure you that rightist whining over the last four years has been both intolerable and often scary. I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids. Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.
Basically, assimilation. It's actually true that the basic conservative values are appealing to a lot of people, and a comfortable default for a lot more. A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
guesswho
8mo ago
For a trait to go extinct due to natural selection not only requires that it be straightforwardly genetic in way that's easy selected over (which is far from certain here), it also requires many generations of constant selection pressure.
Basically no one was discussing polygamy as a valid lifestyle when I was 20. What the world will look like when I'm 60, I have no idea.
So far this relationship between polygamy and fertility has lasted for much less time than a single generation. Given how contextual and cultural it seems to be, I wouldn't make any sweeping predictions which require that contemporary relationship to stay unchanged for a hundred years.
guesswho
9mo ago
I mean, you get paid the same amount for writing the review whether you play for 2 hours or 100 hours, and you don't get paid very much either way.
I'm gonna say it would be pretty hard for most critics to feed themselves if they put 100 hours into every article they write. God forbid they have a family to feed, too.
Most entertainment reviews you see today are on free sites. You get what you pay for.
guesswho
9mo ago
You know what was really awful, with terrible plot, weak characters and acting, and tons of boring filler?
Every Jean Claude Van Damme movie.
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
I'm not going to make any claims about this True Detective thing, I didn't watch the show, haven't followed the coverage or reaction, haven't seen the director's interviews. Don't really care about the particulars of this one case much, the dynamic you are describing is definitely a thing that could exist and very well may, for all I know.
But I do want to complicate the narrative beyond 'The people giving this show terrible reviews aren't saying it's bad because it has female leads and don't explicitly believe that's why they dislike it, therefore the director is wrong to say that they are rejecting it because it has female leads.'
No one would say 'I like Jean Claude Van Damme movies because the lead character is a man.' But a lot of similarly brainless beat-em-up action movies have been released with women leads over the years, often with better objective craft and quality overall, and male audiences have generally rejected all of them. It can be true both that male audiences did not reject those movies out of explicit misogyny, and that they would have enjoyed them more if they had starred a cheesy male lead. Those two things don't actually contradict each other.
So there is in fact a nuanced claim the director could be making here, that audiences 'aren't ready' for a female lead in this type of story, or that the story was written in a way that would appeal more to women audiences but the existing audience was mostly male and liked it less, or that having female leads and director led to some necessary changes from the first season that aren't bad but that are noticeably different and therefore upsetting to big fans who were promised a return to form, or etc. etc. etc.
I just want to carve out the fact that there is room for nuanced claims in this discussion, and we don't always have to reduce discussions about things like this down to the barest-bone caricatures of the two 'sides' in the culture war.
guesswho
9mo ago
Point 1, only 20% of their budget is state funding. That is still any state funding, true, but I feel like sometimes people act like they're entirely state funded and that's really seriously not the case.
Point 2, I think it's reasonable for the government to subsidize education without dictating what the education entails. You can trust the market to efficiently decide what type of education takes place between students and teachers, while also pumping money into the education sector because you think the economy benefits from more education happening overall.
Point 3, I don't want to pay for many aspects of our military, police, and prison systems, to name just a few. 'I shouldn't have to pay for things I dislike' has never been a cogent argument against government spending; it's a democracy, you can vote for what you want but everyone has to pay for everything that ends up in the budget. You don't get a line-item veto unless I do too, and if everyone gets one then we end up with no government at all, society collapses, and we get invaded by China or w/e.
guesswho
9mo ago
And thank god for that. University is voluntary, you can go to whichever one you want, and the 'students' are adults.
The idea that the government should step into that voluntary contract between adults to tell teachers what they can and can't teach or require, especially as relating to partisan political topics, is insane and disgusting.
(before anyone asks, yes, this applies to a university wanting to teach whatever awfulthing you think of as a counter-example, I would like the school to be destroyed socially and economically by private citizens/companies and social sanctions in that situation)
Aside form the most drawn-out and excruciating fates, most of the pain related to death is experienced by family and friends, plus the lost investment of society raising someone to that age and then losing productive years.
A priori, that seems like a really weird and surprising situation, I would start by asking why are they doing that and see if maybe you're doing something wrong or can win them over somehow.
guesswho
9mo ago
Not an actual reply, but noting something funny- you made a joke, I built on the joke in the same spirit and same premise, pretty similar ideas.
Your post is at +14, mine is at -4.
This is a useful metric to me - if I post basically the same thing as someone else, I can expect a delta of -18 after one day independent of content.
Good to know.
guesswho
9mo ago
When you say immigrants, are you saying 'to the US', or some other thing?
If you mean the US, first of all I'd ask you support your claim because it doesn't actually sound correct to me, and second of all I'd say that well educated and affluent people being forced to flee at one specific time to a place that gives them full rights and opportunities is not the same as centuries of chattel slavery and segregation.
guesswho
9mo ago
If you don't believe in HBD, may I ask you - do you believe in HBD anywhere?
Again, motte and bailey.
I don't believe there's sufficient evidence that black people are incapable of economic success such that we should conclude all current inequities are 'natural' and gear policy towards that conclusion. I don't believe there's reason to think that immigration is innately dysgenic and we should close the borders for that reason.
Are various populations different than some other populations by at least some amount on some metrics? Yes, trivially. Random variance alone would make that true, and I don't believe that's the only thing at play in every possible comparison of this type that you could make.
But this isn't the 'random facts about genetics and population statistics' thread, it's the culture war thread. The culture war over HBD is related to politics and policy concerns, and I don't think the people on the HBD side of that war have sufficient evidence to justify any of their policy proposals, or their general aesthetic and ethos on the topic.
If the thing you believe is just the incredibly trivial fact that some groups are at least somewhat different from some other groups on some factors based on population averages, but you don't agree with policy proposals that use specific types of racial inferiority as a bedrock premise, then my advice is that you should not say that you believe in HBD.
The 'some groups are different in some ways' thing is, as you say, trivially true and obvious. The HBD movement uses that as a motte to silence critics, but it's not their actual project or purpose - their project and purpose is about policy geared towards acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies thereby. The obviously true thing doesn't have or need an acronym, this project is what 'HBD' actually means to most people, and if they react badly it's because they're reacting to that actual project, not the obvious motte.
If that's not your project, but you heard someone in the HBD movement say the motte and thought to yourself 'Well I agree with that, I must be an HBD believer', I'm here to tell you that you are being used as a useful idiot by a project you don't agree with. As someone in progressive spaces, I'm very used to the phenomenon, and the signs are easy to recognize once you're looking.
If that is your project, then that is the thing we actually disagree about, and stop trying to paint me as disagreeing with the trivially true motte.
guesswho
9mo ago
There has been social interventions - in pro-'oppressed' direction.
Right, this was posing a hypothetical.
why do Jews do so well economically almost everywhere around the world? I would argue that history has been even less kind to the Jews than to African-Americans,
I am not proposing a generic theory of 'any race that has bad things happen to them will be economically disadvantaged forever.' The world is too complicated for that to be true. I was talking narrowly and specifically about black americans, because I think that's the primary motte of the culture war version of this conversation.
The holocaust was very very very bad, I don't really see any point in making value judgements about whether it was 'worse' than chattel slavery or w/e. But it was a singular event. It wasn't multiple generations living as chattel without education, with it being illegal to teach them to read. It wasn't more decades of segregation and redlining and so forth. It wasn't the long development of a separate oppressed culture and dialect. All of the very specific things I mentioned in my post as causal factors, don't really apply to that situation.
I will agree that racism is keeping back many black American families. Where I DISAGREE is that most of this racism comes from the left, largely via the bigotry of low expectations.
I mean, ok, obviously I disagree with some of your points and characterizations, but my point was about HBD vs other causal factors for racial gaps. It sounds like you are listing a bunch of additional non-genetic factors that cause racial gaps. Does this mean you agree with me that there no strong evidence for HBD explaining racial gaps in this specific instance, because of things like the problems you list?
guesswho
9mo ago
I am not an expert on this topic, but first google result, The US Asian population has doubled since 2000 and has gone up 40x since 1960; today, 57% of Asian Americans were born in a different country, and 30% live in California.
Basically, the averages for Asians in the US are dominated by recent immigrants who start out relatively affluent and don't have the family history of oppression that a chinese person whose ancestors worked on the railroad might be able to attest to. And they tend to cluster in places with high cost-of-living, which translates to 'high income' in national averages that don't adjust for that.
And this isn't true for, say, blacks in the US, of whom 82% are native-born descendants of slaves, and cluster more in southern states with low cost of living.
I've tried a few times to find data on average income/etc for Asian Americans descended from eg chinese railroad workers in the old West vs recent immigrants in the last generation or three, but haven't had any luck. It may be that Asian immigrants so vastly outnumber the 'native' stock of Asians in the US that interbreeding has rendered this distinction meaningless, which I don't think it has for black populations.
guesswho
9mo ago
I expect that they're not true pedophiles in the sense of not being aroused by adults, and rather just get off on the taboo and power dynamics involved, but otherwise I can largely agree.
... Racism?
Or, more charitably: you're variously making unsubstantiated declarations of fact that are not accepted into evidence yet, defending a motte that's entirely different from the bailey people are actually caring about, cherrypicking a couple of statistics that support your view from the entirety of human history and civilization which has literal billions of such metrics you could have chosen instead, and presenting a bunch of disparate and unrelated phenomena and demanding a singular explanation for all of them at once.
Maybe the tiny sub-sub-population of Ashkenazi Jews has an average advantage; good for you, the motte is about whether black people are too stupid to participate equally in the economy, and whether we need to shut down the borders because allowing generic 'immigrants' in will make us dumber.
The claim that adoption studies show kids following racial outcomes rather than parental outcomes is not a fact in evidence, and you would need to do a ton of work to establish what you actually empirically mean by the claim and that it is true, and then the answer for that individual claim would probably be something like 'half those adopted kids were still raised in poverty for the first 5 years' or 'people who put their kids up for adoption have worse genetics to start with and provide bad fetal environments' or 'yeah, we told you racism of various types exists and affects people's outcomes, good job demonstrating that.'
I have no idea what your claim about Tamil Nadu actually means in empirical terms or whether it's anything resembling true, but if it is I have no idea what economic and cultural and historical factors obtain in that part of the world, and from your fluency in English I bet you don't either. By one dumb metric Jeff Bezos alone represents 1% of US GDP, how sure are you that whatever metric you are invoking here is actually much less dumb than that? Based on your knowledge of the region and its history, how sure are you that something local variant of bigotry and discrimination akin to racism can't possibly be the explanation?
Etc. The answer here is 'that sounds a lot like a gish-gallop, and there's a reason people don't respond to those'.
The elephant in the room is only growing larger for anyone following the facts.
I think there's a fundamental difference between the sides here in terms of intuitions about social processes.
Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind, how long would you expect it to take from the day that there is zero race-based discrimination anywhere in the country, to the day when all racial wealth and achievement gaps have been completely eradicated?
My answer is 'probably around 300 to 500 years.'
Poverty sticks. If your parents lived their entire lives without wealth, then you're going to start with no wealth and little investment, you're going to take on debt and take short-term solutions over long-term investments just to stay afloat, you're not going to be able to afford a car to get to the better job you were offered 35 minutes from home, or you'll lose the job when your shitty used car malfunctions and you miss a day. Etc. The basis for all of capitalism is capital accumulation, money making money through investment or collecting rents, and that's a game where starting conditions and your initial pot matter more than anything else.
Poor education sticks. If it was illegal for your great-grandparents to be taught to read, and your grandparents were taught in segregated schools that barely treated them better than animals, and your parents were seen as per-linguistic savages because they spoke a different dialect than their teachers and were put in slow classes and neglected because of it, how well are they going to educate you as an infant, how well are they going to help you with your homework, what kind of relationship with the school and the state are they going to train you to expect? The US absolutely has social and cultural 'classes' that tend to run in families, and coming from a family with a history of poor education makes it a lot harder to escape your class.
Minority status matters. If you are making a movie you may as well appeal to the largest possible audience, white people. And if you want to appeal to white people, you may as well have a white main character. And if your main character is white, a white writer and white director and a white makeup artist and hair stylist will probably provide a more authentic voice and feel to that character. None of that's discrimination, it's just smart business decisions... and you can make the same argument for the management of a company that sells clothes aimed at white people, or customer service jobs in a majority white area, or etc. It's not discrimination to want to mentor up-and-coming employees who you have a lot in common with and see yourself in and enjoy hanging out with, and hey look for the majority white managers those appealing mentees overwhelmingly tend to be white for actually truly non-discriminatory reasons.
And etc., across every aspect of life.
And these aren't just drags on the system that slow down the process of everyone attaining their 'natural' place in the hierarchy. They're mutually-reinforcing process that actively push the people on the bottom further down.
If your career doesn't advance as fast because your boss wanted to mentor someone they felt more in tune with, then you might have to work longer hours and have less time to help with your kids homework, you might be in a lower-tier position that just fires you when your car breaks and you come in late instead of a higher-tier position where that's fine and no one cares, you might retire with less savings and your kids will need to spend their money and time on caring for you in your old age instead of getting themselves training and slack to look for better positions, etc.
I feel like there's a libertarian logic which expects people to be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve the position in life that their natural talents naturally oblige them to. And I'm here to say that, while that story is not impossible for any (single individual to live out, that is just not how hugely stochastic processes involving millions of inter-related causal factors and hundreds of millions of people work, at all.
When you average across hundreds of millions of people, all of those stochastic factors that make it harder or less likely for one newborn infant to have a life trajectory towards their full potential than another really add up.
And if no one is making any conscious effort to correct for those factors - if we have no diversity initiatives and no AA and no social efforts to lift up disadvantaged people and no policies that care about this at all - if we just leave it up to chance and the standard grinding gears of the economy and society and government, then things are not going to sort themselves out quickly.
I don't expect 100% of the first generation of hugely disadvantaged people to experience zero discrimination to completely solve the problem and attain their genetically-proper level in their lifetime. I don't expect 100% of their children to attain it. I don't expect 100% of their grandchildren to attain it. I don't expect 100% of their great-grandchildren to attain it.
I have personal experience with families and their family histories and trajectories that span great-grandparent to great-grandchild. I can see how family circumstances flow over 4 generations, and I can have an intuitive sense that while there's definitely room for variance and changes over that timeframe, there is not an actual 0% casual relationship between the financial and social circumstances of the first and last generation. Not even close.
I admit that I don't have the type of intuition needed to guess what happens after 10 or 15 generations. If our systems of capitalism and government and society don't undergo any big changes in that time, then I still expect the correlations to exist somewhat even over those timeframes, but I really don't know. I can admit that maybe that would be long enough to erase them, just through entropy and simulated annealing, if no one was making any intentional effort to erase them otherwise.
But, that those differences would disappear in 60 years since the Civil Rights Act, even if we pretended that that date was the end of all racism and discrimination in the country. No. Fuck no. Come the fuck on.
People's grandparents were educated under segregation. People's parents couldn't buy homes or get out of slums due to redlining. People in the prime-age workforce today grew up under the anti-ebonics backlash that treated them as stupid and illiterate for being fluent in a non-standard dialect and refused to teach them in a language they understood.
Lots of people overcome those disadvantages, but stochastically they will drag teh average very far down. That's what the word 'disadvantage' means in this context.
So when you say there is 'mounting evidence', my reaction is 'since when? I would expect the timeframe to be hundreds of years, so the fact that the gap has only closed a little in the last 40 years seems like not much evidence to me, pretty close to what I'd expect. And the modern debate over HBD and cancel culture isn't even 40 years old, it's like 10 years old, there absolutely should not be appreciable changes in the data that could count as persuasive evidence over a timeframe like that.
Which makes me wonder if the 'mounting evidence' is less of 'we have a general model of how we expect this process to evolve over time under each hypothesis, and the data is favoring one hypothesis to a decisive degree', and more 'I've been talking about this issue for much of my adult life and nothing has changed in that timeframe, so it sure feels like the situation is unchangeable and will never change and anyone who doesn't admit that is delusional'.
Or maybe the 'mounting evidence' phrase does refer to the entire trend over the last 50 years, and you just expect much bigger changes over that timeframe. It's just the difference in intuition.
Which of course gets back to the big difference in philosophy and intuition between classic liberals and progressives.
The liberal position is 'erase discrimination from our laws and our hearts, and you're done. Without those hard barriers, people will rise to their natural level, we'll have a true meritocracy, no one will have anything to complain about, the world will be just and fair.'
And the progressive position is 'Well, that's a good start, but you don't actually live in the most-convenient-world where that's all it takes. There are inertial factors that keep formerly poor and oppressed groups poor and disadvantaged far into the future, there are persistent structural factors that disadvantage minorities for totally non-discriminatory reasons. Those forces push away from a meritocracy, so if you want a meritocracy you have to actually study what those factors are and apply some type of corrective against them. Those forces have nothing to do with the individual and are fundamentally unjust, so if you want justice you have to go out there and make it yourself.'
And this gets to the fundamental difference in intuition between the left and the right on things like AA and diversity initiatives and minority scholarship grants and etc. The right sees a situation where two resumes arrive and you care about race when evaluating and sees a process that pushes away from meritocracy. The left sees a system where many people never produce a resume that represents their full innate potential because of systemic factors working against them, and sees a correction applied against those factors as a long-term pressure towards a meritocratic equilibrium.
Of course, this is me once again saying 'people who think like me look at the whole picture and the full complexity of the world and have sophisticated thought about how to correct it, people who disagree with me just look at small atomic situations and have simplistic thoughts about how to react to them and never consider the macro-scale implications of that policy'.
There's an extent to which that just feels true, like, the right is more focused on individualism and individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and what is right-or-wrong behavior when two individuals interact, and is inherently suspicious or dismissive of systems-level explanations that rely on stochastic process and probability distributions over outcomes over generations, right? Being derisive towards that type of academic-sounding socialist/communist egghead bullshit is part of the brand, right?
But there's also an extent to which I feel like that must be wrong, where probably everyone can model how their opponent reacts to individual bounded scenarios but can't simulate their larger complicated systemic worldview, and therefore concludes their opponents don't have such a systemic worldview to begin with.
I certainly have the experience of people on the right describing people on the left as though they are motivated by individual-level hatred of white men instead of macro-level concerns about how the overall structure of the system unfairly and dangerously advantages some demographics.
Am I making the same myopic mistake when I say the right views this question through the lens of individual achievement and personal responsibility and misses the larger systemic/stochastic factors that produce national trends in the data? Or is that just literally actually their position?
Would love to hear people's thoughts on that bit, it's a place I could learn something about people's positions and worldviews.
guesswho
9mo ago
It might fall under the umbrella of Tu quoque, although I think the connotation you're going for is slightly different.
guesswho
9mo ago
PO->fentanyl pipeline I was getting mostly from personal observations plus common sense, but also backed by this paper. Though that paper isn't only about fentanyl so maybe it's not a strict majority for fentanyl itself.
For healthcare I can imagine a variety of policies including stricter prescription control, but really I'm thinking about something bigger than that.
I suspect that a lot of things we prescribe long-term pain meds for could be treated with combinations of things like rehabilitative therapy, biofeedback therapy, various surgeries, personal trainers to maintain overall health, etc. And a lot of things that do need pain meds could be prevented from turning into a long-term addiction with close monitoring by a doctor or nurse to test whether patients still need the meds and help them taper off slowly while using exercise/rehabilitation to recover promptly.
(obviously not all chronic pain conditions are like that, but I wouldn't be surprised if 60% of long-term opioid cases could be resolved with something in these genres)
The problem is all of that takes expensive one-on-one care and treatment by a variety of professionals, as well as some type of personal relationship with medical providers where they remember your name and your issues and are forming and executing long-term plans to work through them with you, and all of that is both more expensive than pills and not the way the system wants to be designed. The system is very much geared towards insurance only supporting the cheapest treatment in the short-term, which is normally pills, and in having an atomized care model where you get 15 minutes with your doctor and they follow a checklist to prescribe you something and then your relationship with them is over and you have to start from scratch if you want another appointment.
I really think the opioid epidemic in large part stems from opioids maximizing metrics that the modern healthcare and insurance industries judge themselves by - it 'solves' a ton of problems at a fairly low cost with very little physician time spent and no expensive in-care facilities needed. I think we could improve this and a lot of other medical problems if we weren't so focused on those metrics, but that would require really fundamentally changing the way the whole industry works.
guesswho
9mo ago
Wouldn't be surprised if the short-term and long-term trends are different here - cracking down on prescriptions while tons of people are addicted will force them to look for non-prescription opioids which are more dangerous, but in the long run it may reduce the number of people who get addicted in the first place.
guesswho
9mo ago
Hmm yeah. That's weird, I thought it was right because the CDC also says .32%. Don't know where the discrepancy is then, unless it's that deaths can be listed as having more than one cause?
guesswho
9mo ago
It feels insane, but on the other hand I'm not sure.
It's not like there are many people who would refuse to vote for her but intend to vote for Biden, right? If you resent underqualified black women being shoved into positions of responsibility as publicity stunts, you're already voting for Trump.
(and it's not like a former first lady is a priori less qualified than a reality TV show host, 'qualified' has sort of stopped being a thing in politics anyway)
And she could certainly energize some groups of voters of the left who are pretty apathetic or hostile towards Biden, and might drive up turnout.
It's definitely a more all-in strategy, betting on going full polarization and driving turnout on the extremes, rather than the Biden strategy which is desperately clinging to the center and hoping to gather enough of the remaining scraps of the-world-as-it-was-20-years-ago to limp over the finish line.
But yeah, probably nuts, but more interesting than it might sound at first.
EDIT: Looks like I screwed up the math and chart stuff and it's all kind of weird. CDC says drug overdose is .32% of deaths, but that doesn't jive with their listed number of deaths in 2023, off by an order of magnitude. I'm wondering if deaths have more than one listed cause, or if some set of these numbers are projections or something.
As to why we won't talk about this more: We've talked about the opioid epidemic a lot, which is what this stat is about. 20% of opioid deaths are on prescription meds, and as far as I can tell the large majority of fentanyl users started with prescription opioids and then switched to fentanyl when they could no longer obtain/afford their growing addiction to prescribed meds.
Basically, you can't solve this problem without majorly overhauling the US healthcare system, which is a political quagmire that has been swallowing careers and movements whole for decades (Hillary Clinton started her political life as First Lady pushing for healthcare reform, and it didn't accomplish any more then than it has now).
Sure, you can imagine a world where you lock down the borders enough to stop all imported fentanyl (although the link to immigration is an obvious misdirect, imported drugs tend to come over sea borders and ports not the Mexican land border, and the programs to find caravans of people vs suitcases of drugs are completely different). But we import it because that's cheaper, not because it's the only way... US criminals are well capable of making their own fentanyl to sell if other supply lines close up.
You have to stop demand, which means fixing the prescription opioid epidemic, which means massively overhauling much of how we think about healthcare and the entire healthcare and insurance industries. That's disruptive, expensive, and politically difficult... not to mention opposed to the interests of a lot of rich capitalists. So, good luck on that.
Roe vs. Wade just got overturned because of his SC nominations.
That might not be a big deal to you, but I assure you it's a big deal to a lot of women around the country, and the men who care about them. That's a big harmful thing, just on its own.
I'll also point out that most on the left will blame Trump for not having a strong response in the early days of Covid where we could have maybe actually headed off the worst outcomes, and for letting his party fall into turning COVID into a partisan issue where it was impossible for any policy to fight it because half the country would disobey. I don't in a million years expect I could convince you that;s factually true, so I don't want to argue about it, but you have to be aware that it's the type of thing the people who disagree with you think about when they say 'Trump was a bad president'.
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