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In a long term sense, the enslavement of Africans kind of helped. The modern descendants of American slaves live better lives than the citizens of most African countries.

It’s still absurd to propose that the benefits of slavery were worth the consequences, but I’m not actually sure that’s what they’re suggesting here.

Personally, I’m tired of talking about slavery as a black and white issue. I’m tired of the racial guilt people try to impose on whites because some white people a long time ago did awful things. Slavery is wrong no matter who does it, and white people were not even close to being the only slavers.

The narrative in these stories is always “white people enslaved blacks”, when it should be “shitty people enslaved other people”. 1000x more lip service is paid to the enslavement of blacks before most of us were born than is given to actual slavery taking place in the modern day.

Get over it. My ancestors were enslaved barely more than a century ago too. Here I am, went to school, got a career, and now I own my own house and car. All because of the freedom North America provides. And I’m not even one of those visible minorities who benefits from affirmative action. It could have been even easier for me to get where I am.

Can I just say this “no forced pregancy” sign is kind of hilarious? As if Ben Shapiro is coming into your room at night, putting a gun to your head, and making you have sex.

No one is forcing you to get pregnant. The only question is whether or not you are allowed to terminate the pregnancy YOU began.

It’s pretty damned easy to not have sex. Most people manage it without even trying. The entitlement of modern people knows no bounds. We want zero consequences for our own actions, while condemning other people for so much as writing an off color Facebook post over a decade ago.

I guess it’s too much to ask for people to be responsible for their own choices.

I mean, it is morally cleaner if an infant dies accidentally rather than intentionally. I’m not sure this pokes as many holes in pro-life as you think it does.

I’m basically in the middle on this issue. I’m pro-life but think abortion should be accessible. No, that does not put me in the pro-choice camp. Pro-choice these days essentially means abortion for everyone, all the time, whenever they want it. I am the kind of person who wanted legalized abortion based on the “safe but rare” mindset. Abortions aren’t even close to rare. Loads of people don’t even think twice about getting one. I would know, as I work in healthcare, and regularly have to talk about pregnancy with female patients.

A lot of people use abortion as a safety net to enable a promiscuous lifestyle. There’s a big difference between a teenager coming in for one because the condom broke, and the party girl who is there for the fourth time that year.

I’ve never agreed with an outright abortion ban, but something needs to change. I do care about infant mortality, no matter the cause, and many pro-lifers care like I do. Don’t pretend to have the moral highground, as if free abortions for everyone means you are morally pure. This is a lose-lose situation. Pro-life or pro-choice, neither of us should feel like we are doing something morally right. The only question is what is more important, the freedom of the mother to control her own body, or the freedom of the baby to not be terminated. You’re hurting someone no matter which side you’re on.

And here I am, a moderate, waiting for lefties and right wingers alike to please, for the love of god, embrace nuclear. Why is it that conservatives I know are all on board with the most environmentally friendly, efficient, cost-effective form of energy, but my liberal friends aren’t? Instead we funnel money into wind and solar, extremely inefficient forms of energy.

Oh well. Guess I’ll just sit here while lefties keep putting carbon taxes on everything and avoid actually doing anything about the problem. It’s easier to strawman conservatives on the internet than to invest in real solutions.

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Maybe I’m just a piece of shit, but I’m really tired of seeing so much money being spent outside of Canada, and to try to put women to work regardless of their individual preferences. I think women should be able to work, don’t get me wrong. But my wife wants to be a stay at home mom. She can’t afford to be. A big contributor to this reality is that the doubling of the labor force has been an enormous factor in stagnating wages. We went from mothers being able to raise their kids, and families being able to be financially stable on a single income, to the state subsidizing daycare so someone else can raise your kid while you provide labor.

Another issue I have here is the concern about tuberculosis rates. This is a huge can of worms, but the reserve system doesn’t work. I understand why it exists. I think the goals are understandable. But you can’t choose to live separately from Canadian society and then complain that we don’t provide you with good enough homes and healthcare. We all trade cultural cohesion to be a part of Canadian society. In return, we get better access to important resources and technology.

If you want Canadian healthcare and good housing, assimilate, get a job, live in a reasonably sized population center, and you’ll have those things. You don’t have to live in Toronto or Vancouver, but you do need to participate in the system that creates that value in the first place. You can’t just stay on your reserve, spending all your money on alcohol and drugs, and expect necessities to be provided to you based on white guilt. And yes, this is what life is like on a lot of reserves. They live in horrendous conditions. That’s why TB is so prevalent.

I am empathetic to the fact that these people are born into a world that is not stacked to help them succeed. I don’t think we help them by trying to enable the existence of reserves. One of my close colleagues came from one of these reserves, and she always says the best decision she ever made was to come to a city, get educated, and start a career. The rest of her family are back on the reserve, and they’re all alcoholics. Whereas she lives in a small town, has a house and car, and still gets to celebrate her culture with other indigenous people who live here.

We provide the most benefit to the most people by consolidating resources, not by reinforcing the fantasy that we can live in tiny communities on the fringe of society and still get all the benefits of modern society. Live together, or suffer alone.

From a business perspective, we are resources. You can’t run a business if you treat everyone as indispensable individuals. They’re cogs in a machine that all serve a purpose.

That said, you should invest in your workers. You want them to be healthy and competent. You want to train them to be more effective. You want them to want to be at your company so that you don’t lose that investment.

Finding this balance is the healthiest form of employee-employer relationship. You should neither care so much about an individual employee that the company suffers rather than replace them, nor should you care so little that you throw them away at the first sign of inconvenience. It’s unfortunately a tough balance to get right.

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I’m always amazed at how rarely the “go to uni and get a good job” angle is brought up in relation to our failing foundational industries in the west. We’ve been incentivizing people to focus on “escaping” the working class, rather than trying to find ways to make those jobs more appealing.

I work in healthcare. Treating student practitioners badly is the norm in a ton of places in this field. 60 hour work weeks are normalized, and wanting a good work-life balance gets you ostracized.

The worst part is that I had to compete to get into this job that treats me badly. My program only takes the top 20 applicants out of hundreds per year. The schooling is brutal, with midterm or final exams 2-3 times a week. This is possible because you are blowing through courses consecutively rather than in a semesterized system. Once you get to practical placement, you are treated like the workplace bitch, and you’re expected to do 2-3x the work of a paid worker for free. Actually, you’re paying tuition to be there, so it’s even worse.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the brutality is necessary. The rapid pace of learning makes it hard to forget anything. It’s a great way to pack knowledge into the brain. But I would never recommend my program to anyone. It was a horrible experience overall. My job is pretty great minus the ridiculous hours, so I’m glad I went. But if I could go back and tell my younger self to do something else, I would.

There’s a very good reason for teaching people that violence is the absolute last resort that should never be tolerated except under the worst conditions. It’s because people are stupid.

If you taught them there were any lower of a threshold for violence, there would be violence over anything. Violence is already extremely commonplace. So is political anger. Do you really think we would be better served by an even more volatile populace?

Political violence is rarely a positive thing. It can be, sure. But history is full of examples where revolution lead to greater tyranny. I’d rather the average person realize that they aren’t intelligent enough to make the average political system better with violence. They’re a lot more likely to make it worse without very judicial application of violence, and leaders who know how to make the most of what is left behind after the violence ends.

Your reaction is why I think left and right as political descriptors are extremely lacking. The above opinions are shared by many right wingers. The right to bear arms has largely been fought for by right wingers who have been called conspiracy theorists for thinking that the government may need to be overthrown some day.

Everyone should be ready and able to overthrow their leaders. The fear of the citizenry is one of the most powerful motivators to keep politicians from devolving into the corrupt sycophants we have now. They need to learn to be afraid of us again.

Dude, Tony Todd as Venom sounds epic. I can’t wait to see how well he does with the role.

Did you actually do your research on that “deworming drug”? It’s been used to treat a hell of a lot more than parasites. That is just its most common use.

This has always been funny to me as someone who actually works in healthcare and regularly reads scientific studies. Of all the things you could choose to hate Trump over, the example you give is one that plenty of people in the scientific community considered to be a treatment avenue worth researching.

Damn, the media propaganda machine is effective. Trump could run into a burning building to save a litter of puppies and they’d still find a way to make everyone hate the guy. It’s impressive.

They probably would have just called you names instead of openly engaging with your ideas. That’s the norm in my experience. I sometimes wonder why I bother posting at all.

Then again, I do get some traction, and some representation of ideas outside the common narratives is better than none. But it does seem like if you aren’t in lockstep with the popular narratives, you get a cascade of downvotes just for entertaining unpopular ideas.

People don’t want you to think for yourself. They just want you to parrot their beliefs back to them and give them affirmation.

Who isn’t fascist/racist in the eyes of the left? You can be a moderate libertarian with a couple of populist beliefs and they’ll throw those labels at you.

Thanks for all you’ve done, I hope this place just keeps growing!

Shit, if all conservatives had that nice an ass I wouldn’t mind listening to their opinions.

Wait, preferential? Gender dysphoria isn’t about preference, it’s a mental illness. Gender affirmation is the accepted treatment.

By that logic, chemotherapy is a “preference” for people with cancer.

I say this as someone who doesn’t really care about whether or not you have to pay. Government is going to government. They would charge you for breathing if they could.

Mhmm. Trains certainly reduce traffic. They also infinitely increase your likelihood of direct interaction with crackheads and casual sexual assault by strangers.

I took public transit for a decade of my life. I prefer my car, thanks.