Political Memes

Why do so many people these days have this weird notion that it has to be all or nothing, and everyone else has to want what THEY want or else be forced to participate?

Simply put, most people who believe in any sort of moral code, believe in such a code because they think they are correct. If they didn't think they were correct, they wouldn't believe it. This includes whatever people might be able to entertain about what would be correct in a given hypothetical scenario, or a broader issue. Extrapolation to the broad.

The reason "states rights" is kind of an iffy look is, you know, retroactive slavery justification from southern civil war apologists, but also, as a rhetorical tactic broadly, people bring up states' rights as a kind of distraction. Now, we're not talking about roe v. wade, whether or not roe v. wade was a good decision, or whether or not it's good for women to have access to healthcare, which, you know, it is, right, I don't think that's particularly controversial. Now, we're talking about states' rights, experimentation with democracy, that sorta shit, which is kind of blech.

I would also generally be opposed to other people's freedoms when they start doing harm, right, which is kind of a vacuous statement or whatever, right, how do we qualify harm? But if someone's doing an organic backwoods farm where they're introducing invasive species and destabilizing the ecosystem, that's a problem. If people are sacrificing their firstborn to odin, I'd say that's also a problem. If people are entering that kind of lifestyle en masse to such a degree that it starts to destabilize everyone else's lives, or cause them active harm, that's also a problem. See my first paragraph, here.

We can also see how there's kind of a more complicated relationship between states in something like the whole controversy between new york and texas, and immigrant buses, or whatever. New york wants to create a kind of liberal society, where their citizens have social safety nets, and they can benefit off of migrant labor while attempting to integrate them into society, right, relative to texas, in which migrant labor is exploited via under the table deals, on the basis that there is no legitimate alternative because the immigration system is super underfunded (this happens in new york too, this is a bad example, but entertain the hypothetical for a moment, I'm making a broader point here). If new york receives a shit ton of immigrants and floods their capacity to manage them all, their social safety nets will fail, and everything will kind of regress to the mean, to the status quo, which is going to be a problem especially when you're getting a lack of political will and buy-in to lots of these ideas, and these things can be kind of repealed on a whim. We see the same thing almost in reverse, again, with texas, where they can lower their taxes on corporations to be next to nothing, and then suddenly all the corporations pull out of cities like san francisco and LA, and move to texas, and everything just kind of, races to the bottom, as it were. States do this all the time, where senators compete to be more favorably looked upon by corporations with their political decisions in order to get factories and "bring jobs" to their states, and get more voter turnout, even if the quality of life in their states ends up massively suffering as a result. It is a free market approach to a country.

To compress a lot of that metaphor, states' rights, sure, but, states' rights to do what? But I have completely digressed, I still find this to be kind of an aside, a tangent.

It's a frustrating turnaround to encounter, ja feel? I come up against it a lot when I bring up, say, like, car-centricity, right. I can point out a lot of the problems with the lifestyle. It doesn't scale well, it's not useful in many circumstances, etc, but then I bump up against this problem of, well, actually, it's their choice, so, eat it loser, nobody cares. They don't contest the actual content of the point I'm making, or whether or not I'm right or wrong about a specific thing, they just say, oh, well, other people can choose to be wrong if they want. I can accept that, but you can understand why that's also not a satisfying answer at all, right? It's an anti-empathy answer, it's incurious, it doesn't seek to learn about other people's perspectives or lives in any way, and it doesn't seek truth. That's kind of not what I'm about.