I get that this is upvoted a lot due to being constructive but it also reflects a lot of Republican media tropes about the left that aren’t really true - and that’s why trying to “fix” these things won’t work - because it misses the real problem.

Examples: No significant figure on the left is saying “men are rapists”, or telling men to be more like women, etc. Reducing suicide, safer workplaces, and reducing excessive prison sentences are all priorities for the left and not for the right.

I think the real problem is quite simple: Republicans have invested heavily in portraying themselves as the “masculine party”, and in driving the narratives I’ve mentioned. And because Republican leaders like the Murdochs and Elon tend to be men, they’re best at driving those narratives.

Which goes to the real underlying problem with the left as a whole - no ability to drive or counter a media narrative. The right has Fox news and Elon’s control over Twitter, which they can and do regularly use to create whatever narrative they want. Notice how for example they just made white south African farmer killings a topic all of a sudden. The left has a bunch of corporate media whose top priority is selling truck ads. Sure, maybe the reporters themselves are left leaning, but they have no top down guidance as to what narratives to build.

And until the left creates some sort of media capability to create and control narratives, the right will always have a leg up. And because of that, none of the well intentioned ideas here will actually work. If the left tries to appeal to men, the right will decide how those appeals will be interpreted.

On the contrary it’s right, perhaps even acute

Assuming you actually believe I misunderstood their argument, perhaps it would be more useful to explain their actual argument that I’m not grasping?

So this version of the argument basically amounts to: people who have harmed society should contribute to social welfare that bolsters the economy and society collectively. Which while a solid effort and earning my upvote, 1) the_petty_auntie’s reply doesn’t show signs of making this particular argument and 2) in this particular case, it fails because society as a whole wasn’t harmed by her son’s actions - rather a particular victim was. And as the victim was a teen at the time of the incident, it’s unlikely that the victim would be able to take advantage of student loan forgiveness unless it happened many years ago.

The question asks why the audience’s student loans should be repaid now when hers were not. The response is that the reason is the same as paying for her son’s prison sentence for raping a minor, which is “betterment of society”. Let’s count the number of ways this fails:

• “For the betterment of society” is a justification that could be used for pretty much any defensible policy decision. It really doesn’t further the argument at all unless there is something specified about how paying student loans makes society better.
• RAPING A MINOR is in caps both to indicate shoutiness and to emphasize this aspect of the crime, which again, is hard to tie back to an argument about student loans
• The main failure - the fact that it’s a blatant ad hominem directed at the poster for having a son who raped a minor, which is an evidently successful attempt to hide the weakness of the purported argument by casting the OP as someone whom one would not want to be associated with by virtue of being a parent to a rapist. This implied argument, which is the real argument, is invalid in the absence of evidence that rapist-parents cannot have valid opinions.
• It’s also a particularly egregious example of an ad hominem because it relies on guilt/worthiness by blood relation, the same concept behind ideas like racism and even worse, inheritance.

Better answers might include:

• Education costs have risen to a degree that the fairness calculation is now different
• Student loan debt is a threat to the whole economy and just as bailing out banks sometimes makes sense, bailing out student loan holders might as well
• Financial inequality is out of control and we should dispense with antiquated notions of “fairness” to the wealthy when circumstances have been more fair to them overall than at any time in the past

But these answers would not get reposted on social media as much because they don’t play into tribalism and social drama.

All three people here are terrible

In 2020 Trump’s approval was so low that Bill Cosby could’ve beaten him.

Biden was a long-time failed presidential candidate even when he was younger and better at speaking. In the same primary election in 2008 where Obama was first and Hillary was second, Biden was a total embarrassment - if I recall he didn’t get a single delegate. But in 2020 he rode the popularity of the Obama administration to the top just like Clinton did in 2016.

The tendency of democratic voters, especially in early primary states to pick some familiar name is completely devastating to Democrat electability. The last candidate to win on his own merits rather than being associated with someone else was Obama and he crushed it. Anyone associated with past administrations needs to be ruled out from the get go because they almost certainly suck.

I’m just thinking back to 2016 when someone got the idea that Joe Biden should run. And somehow nobody could stop it.

The most politically incorrect truth is this: People are not good or bad, individual people do a variety of good and bad things. Mister Rogers told his gay friend to stay in the closet and marry a woman. Hitler banned animal cruelty. We don’t like to talk about these things, but it’s a true principle and a useful one to live by.

“This is crazy, we voted for Trump, we trusted him, his word, what he promised Latinos,” she said.

And what promises were those, exactly? What Trump promised latinos was to deport all the other latinos they don’t like.

That’s Trump’s magic. He tells one group of people and says “I hate the same people you hate.” Then he goes to another group of people and says the same thing. Eventually he’s convinced everybody he hates everybody, but not themselves.

Well he can get an exemption if he pays a $10 million consulting fee to Ballard Partners. I assume he’s okay with that, because that’s what he voted for.

I can’t help but read this while replacing “rock” with “large language model”

Heuristics that almost always work. Hmm.

AI Project Manager: Create a button on a webpage that, when clicked, displays an alert saying “Hello World!”
AI Programmer: “What a sensible requirement! Here you go.”
AI Billing Department: “Project completed, that’ll be 10 million dollars.”
Client AI Payments Department: “Sounds right, paid!”

Always has been.

Skibidi Toilet is the modern Ninja Turtles.

I’d be more likely to believe that Boeing tried to kill him if he didn’t die

In addition to what everyone else says, I’ve done well with rubbing aloe on after. I’m not usually a natural goop guy but my ex bought it for me and I found it actually works pretty well.

It used to be a racial thing, like only white guys would do it. Probably has to do with the hyperactive degree of masculinity signalling in black and hispanic cultures, at least back in the gangsta rap era. Now we’re in the age of white Republican masculinity signalling, so I guess it’s their thing now.

I will say from back in the days of yore when a girl would let me anywhere near her it did strike me as a bit gross, but I did enjoy seeing her enjoy it. I think the fact that it’s a bit gross and she enjoys it means it’s kind of subservient, so you can’t be an alpha male if you do it. Says a lot about how so much of this sort of fundamentalist masculinity culture is pretending about what men want rather than being about what men really want.

That’s a much bigger topic though.

I agree but the goal should be not to win a debate, but use their debate platform to slip some woke mind virus into their drink. I always liked to ask very simple questions that they thought they knew the answer to already and make them defend their inevitably irrational answers. For example I used to ask what race is Mariah Carey, because it’s a question everyone seems to have a different strong opinion on that can’t withstand much questioning. The goal being to make them realize on their own that race is a social construct. Whether that ever worked with anyone I don’t know.

Up to you? I used to hang out on a WN part of reddit back when that was allowed and debate people but that’s not a thing anymore. The problem is you have utterly no idea if you’re getting through to anyone. I do feel like people had to back off their angry racial ideas and adopt a softer “racial zoo” argument that made it seem like all they wanted was to preserve racial diversity rather than eliminate any particular race. I mean at times I wonder if they were looking in the mirror going “is that really why I have this swastika tattoo?” but I have no idea.

I do think the far right cannot survive much scrutiny of its ideas because they are very irrational, but to be honest the left has done a terrible job pointing this out. I know many people even on the moderate right feel like there’s a grain of truth to racism that they’ll admit in private with other white people, but then once you confront racism and question common assumptions about race* all that falls apart. Many attack racism as a moral failing and that doesn’t work because it makes it sound like the truth is being suppressed for moral reasons.

*The most pernicious being the idea that people have a single race on a fundamental level that isn’t up for debate