welcome to the fest

Sure there will be plenty of people who do think of the USA as the best country in the world and humanity's best hope for freedom etc. I think there will also be plenty who see it as a pretty distorted place, where you're fine if you have enough money and pretty screwed otherwise. Not as bad as Duba...

Or maybe because they don't want to be put to the trouble of thinking things through properly? Much easier just to hold onto your instinctive opinions and not analyse them too deeply. Sometimes people don't get as far as even having a "why", which might be why they get annoyed when asked about it!

I know what you mean about the American perception of "left": the Dems would probably count as right-wing by European standards. I'm not sure about anyone 'pretending sex isn't real'. That's something I'd like to ask you more about, but as you say this thread may not be the place. It's the leap from...

Sure. So what's the chain of reasoning that has landed us here? I think it's maybe something like: Down with the patriarchy Trans women are an attempt by men to colonise womens spaces The left embraces trans rights The lwft is an illiberal cult that uses cancellation to squash dissent In fact, the l...

I dunno - there are parallels between the debates, and even if it was derailed the thread did seem to have re-railed itself pretty quickly.

People make sense of things in terms of how those things relate to themselves I guess. Fuel prices are going up... how does that affect *me*? My government is increasingly blatant in its dishonesty... have they lied about anything *I* personally care about? Someone whose gender identity confuses me ...

Or to put it another way: the patriarchy couldn't be happier that some feminists are preoccupied with trans people rather than concentrating on the actual problem (i.e. said patriarchy).

Divide and conquer is exactly it. As long as the majority is at each other's throats, tearing each other down, we have no energy left for the crooked minority who really deserve our attention. The worst part of it is that we do it to ourselves. Humans are inherently tribal (look up Social Identity T...

It must be very hard to keep such a belief system running. Cognitive Dissonance is a terrifyingly powerful force in the human mind. Yes and no to both the above, I think. Have you encountered the Duhem-Quine thesis? It's basically the idea that none of our beliefs can be assessed in isolation, you ...

Oh, I see - so in the real world millions are dead from COVID with a tiny number being harmed by the vaccines, while in Sinfest world there are no COVID deaths just a malicious pharma industry pushing a useless and dangerous vaccine. And the two worlds are so different in this respect that there's n...

I have to admit I'm baffled by today's too. How did we get here - unless this is satire?