I did not call Americans morons nor was my intention to tell you what to do to solve the problem. I simply told you why there isn’t more help coming from the outside. It’s not a matter of people deliberately sitting on their hands.

Unless American leadership breaks the International rules enough to get the sign on of multiple countries to work in concert against America in a world war you are on your own because of rules designed to allow countries to self govern. Other countries cannot alter another country’s government for good or for ill. This is not an indictment of the voting habits or a rebuke of the process of citizen power the American public.

Whether you or any other country solve your problem democratically or through violent collapse the world is handcuffed. There are civil wars going on right now in other countries and the rules are the same for them as they are for you. The world will recognize whatever government is effectively in power once the dust settles but outsiders cannot lawfully tip the scale and go kingmaking unless one side of the conflict violates the rules of war. War itself is not internationally illegal. The US falling into a full on civil war is kosher from an international law standpoint.

The USA has a historic tendency to ignore that international legality and go kingmaking themselves utilizing the resource of spies and subterfuge ONLY because they are singularly powerful enough on the world stage to get away with it. America essentially declared itself a world police force and the sheer infrastructure they have worldwide means that no individual country can compete. Look for yourself how many bases America has on foreign soil compared to every other country. How many armaments and millitary force and how, their ethics policies of their intelligence agencies differ. America is singularly unique. It may be why you believe the rest of the world will help you “fix” things but that’s not in the interests of the rest of the world.

Foriegn leaders are “standing up to America” but they are doing so by cutting themselves free of American coercion for the security and benefit of their own citizens. By framing America out of the picture and moving reliance to other countries and letting America starve itself once the supply chain contracts and treaties expire they will decrease American influence on world policy. It doesn’t benifit those countries to try and swoop in and shore up a crumbling empire which has held guns to their heads for generations. International help currently isn’t coming for American citizens. Unless your country fixes it’s problems itself fairly soon the “standing up to America” that is happening will level your economy and diplomatic power as other governments profit from the diminishing of American hard power that will continue for decades.

Believing that someone is or should be coming to your rescue may not be in your best interest. Not when so many stand to gain long term from your division.

Because that would require either a terrorist action or a bunch of Internationally illegal tampering with American Democracy or declaring war against the World power with the the largest standing army and deepest pockets for arsonal. The rest of the world is effectively held hostage while Americans solve their own problems.

It’s the reason why a lot of bad people in power stay in power. There can be tariffs and sanctions and all manner or soft power deals but the rules are rules. Sovereignty and a right to run your country mostly the way you want is protected as a right and and the US used its positioning as the least devastated megapower/millitary supremacy post WWII to basically bend the world over and get a lot of acceptions to a lot of rules.

Honestly, from most of my experience in dealing with fox news poisoned people who are not total wastes irl : pedophillia is an actual hard line. Most of them have this fantasy of if they found a child predator that they would beat their face in. It is the act inexcusable.

They also are quite fond of the language of conspiracy theories and just the implication has gotten some of them to start thinking.

Will actual hard proof and just hearsay of not just Trump but a number of his people hit some of them like a truck? Yes. Will it sway every Republican? No. But considering how much of their power is based off the Evengelical idea that they are morally on high I would expect a shockwave. His support is already diminishing but add in the firey rage of having a known pedo in that holy of holy offices valued so intensely by the American-supremacists of the crowd and some frozen gears will start moving and every little bit helps.

Marriage makes locktight a lot of “privileges” that matter. Your “roommate” of several years can be denied a place at your bedside when you or the child you are raising together are dying. In regards to kids a lot of joint non-married/divorced mixed sex custody is held on the name placed on birth certificates… but same sex couples will have only one name on that certificate. Marriage is super important in a queer context for making sure you are able to participate in your childrens lives.

In the same way a lack of formal marriage can make your next of kin parents who do not “agree with your lifestyle” make critical health decisions on your behalf. They can stick your partner in hellish limbo spaces with banks if you die and you didn’t make a will leaving you without support of pre existing programs or survivor benefits. A bunch of legal doors can close meaning you are more easily separated from your nearest and dearest when traveling, emigrating, interfacing with the criminal justice and court system. Queer marriage is a legal sheild that protects the pair of you in many ways more than straight couples because it stops a lot of institutional bias that dismisses your relationship as potentially not relevant to the authorities who gatekeep access.

They all just pulling a Judge Frollo. Singing Hellfire and putting Esmeralda on the pyre are not exclusive.

Something to consider on two fronts.

1. Parents being of both sexes is not terribly important for long term child raising. Same sex couples sometimes choose to adopt but they often have the capacity to have children themselves without assistance of a medical body and often with the help of friends or compassionate donors. There are a lot of gay folks whose names are on the birth certificates of their kids because they did the deed the old fashioned way in the interest of having a kid. They maybe just didn’t enjoy the process. This doesn’t present a problem legally because mechanically speaking people have kids out of wedlock or split up amicably all the time and the mechanisms for transferring parental rights are pretty much the exact same.

Also your concerns are not new. They are also not unstudied. It has been studied extensively. Science has found there is no meaningful difference between the outcomes of being raised by a same-sex couple as a mixed sex couple. They measured their rubric across a number of success variables across physical wellbeing, mental and emotional health, acedemic outcomes and so on. Basically if you are raised by adults who show affection, are responsible and committed to the wellbeing of the child it doesn’t really matter what their sex is. At some point trusting a body of science is nessisary over one’s gut feelings or supposition.

Here’s a study with an approachable abstract to get you started.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4091994/

2. Marriage exists in a number of cultures, its functions even in a traditional sense are not always religious in nature and not all cultures that have marriage have bans on same sex couples marrying. Religions can also be newly formed and are still valid. Banning same sex marriage is in effect favouring some religion over others. Christianity does not have a monopoly on the concept of marriage as a religious feature. When a religions (ie Christian) reason is given to enforce a marriage ban it stops other religions from being able to properly function. Gay marriage being federally allowed does not stop Christian denominations from being allowed to refuse to marry couples under the beliefs of their religious creed.

This presupposes that marriage is a strictly religious tradition - which is false. Marriage as a concept exists across many cultures sometimes as a religious tradition and sometimes as a civil one or as a swearing of personal oaths.

It is also not strictly a thing that all religions abhor same sex unions or do not have traditional same sex marriage as a thing. There are a number of Indigenous religions across the world which have gay marriage as a feature, new religions can factor them in as valid or existing religious sects can change. Bans on gay marriage force the state to adopt the traditional Christian stance on marriage at the exclusion of other religions and cultural traditions… While also denying a number of functions at a civil level such as spousal benefits, rights regarding legal decisions, visitation rights in hospitals and so on.

Political philosophy is fascinating, please keep it in the excellent universities (sorry, “colleges”) outside of the USA and let us try and fix this goddamned mess.

How else do you think you are going to fix this mess? Revolution is great for creating change but dollars to donuts you end up with shit systems unless you have a core of political science minded people in the pocket. That really was what made the original American revolution work - you had a core of people who were HEAVILY invested in the works of political science philosophers ( Locke, Hume etc.) and the dedication to replace the outgoing regime with something other than meatheaded revolutionaries who just replicate the same system over again with some new face.

Colloquially liberal as opposed to the more strict political philosophical definition.

If you are going with the latter none of the above statements are strictly liberal as liberalism is defined by a very personal property based capitalism forward structure and a focus on personal freedoms balanced by a set of assumed privileges.

By the political philosophy definition both Republicans and Democrats are liberal. A growing number of people find the issue of the USA’s strict adhereance to old school philosophic liberalism the main problem of both parties since it does fuck all to check the accrual of personal property or provide safety nets. If you wanted to be more accurate by the change in social standard in the place you find yourself the above values in the post are safest “Progressive”. At least keeping this definition in mind helps navigate a lot of the conversation of politics in many Lemmy instances.

“Being born in the wrong body” is a phrase used to simplify a fairly complex situation in a way that also makes it seem like to trans people it’s a metaphysical belief about the nature of the the soul. This is by and large incorrect. What trans people experience isn’t delusion. Delusion relies on a belief that contradicts reality or relies on the very shaky ground of the insubstantiated supernatural. What trans people experience is an uncontrolled mental reaction to physical replicatable stimuli to their own bodies. All the cultural stuff is in service to this.

For example - When you call a trans man a woman - what that person is reacting to is your perception of their body making them ground in that physical discomfort. It is like if you had a physical feature you despised, say a physical deformation with a traumatic memory attached, and people kept remarking on it in conversation. While you might be able to walk the world happily temporarily forgetting it exists someone remarking on it is like shoving a mirror in your face. This is why misgendering doesn’t have to be intentional to be hurtful.

Our culture has a lot of cultural protections built in for people who have deformaties through birth or accident because we understand universally the effect those things have on the psyche. It’s impolite to stare, to mention or exclude people with those features. Gender however is harmless for about 98% of the population. It’s remarked upon in the form of pronouns in every conversation where three or more people participate. This is ultimately why that saying "trans women are woman (etc.) " exists. It’s not them saying that trans people have any misunderstandings or delusions about the history of their bodies or how they differ from cis women. They have no delusions, they are painfully aware, at all times, exactly how they differ. What that saying is trying to convey is that a trans person should not be treated or categorized by society any differently than cis people of that gender or should be accommodated for being treated as neither gender.

This is also why surgeries are often employed. It’s in part to gain unwitting compliance from a population who reacts to physical sex characteristics and pairs that with gender. It’s mending how people react to themselves in the mirror as much as it is removing the mirror from the hands of other people. What the removal of the disorder portion of the DSM was about was an acknowledgement that this problem is cultural. It is as much a problem with society’s constructions and beliefs around sex and gender as it is a singular person’s problem. Just as being gay is only a problem if society responds to it as an undesirable characteristic the issues with being trans are exacerbated by cultural sorting of gender into exclusive categories and people’s personal ick about people’s surgical and hormonal personal autonomy around their bodies.

The reason trans people have to frame their fight primarily as medically nessisary intervention is largely because of cis people’s squeamishness causing them issues of lack of personal freedom to choose how to personally navigate a society not built to manage their specific personal struggles around their physical sex. The problem with society isn’t going anywhere most places yet so the individual is assuming the burdens of that and it’s well proven that those experiencing this issue are tackling that issue in thoughtful, logic based ways with proven ability to accurately judge risk and reward of their choices on that front.

Women who are like that usually change their mind after a couple of years buckled into the yoke. There’s currently a whole group of women stuck in golden handcuffs in the trad wife influencer community who are miserable in their relationships but making too much ad money to consider stopping.

I mean dude, love the energy but this isn’t a protest to those laws… that’s just going out for enough time in public to need to use a public restroom as a trans man.

Trans men getting arrested by police for ‘causing a disturbance’ by being forced to use the women’s bathroom isn’t a bug, it’s a transphobic feature. They want to make being trans as uncomfortable as possible because they think that if they can ratchet up the discomfort level less people will attempt to transition. Trans men who pass on average are massively uncomfortable using the ladies room because it’s a great way to get arrested by cops, hastled by security, banned from private property, assaulted by women, yelled at and abused because everyone assumes you are a cis male creep, they want you to suffer for being trans or they just don’t care.

Like trans women are generally the forefront of the conversation but when it comes to trans men this isn’t “malicious compliance.” it’s either compliance compliance or stealthily breaking the law and hoping nobody notices. The trans deterrent system is operating as intended.

It’s more like the definition used by Right leaning government to cast Progressive social agendas as the downfall of society because in their case you slap “Neo” on something to mean “Untested and scary”. This isn’t so much a “Tankie” thing so much as a Fox News thing.

They get away with it because people aren’t taught or don’t absorb the actual technical meanings of different labels for subtypes of political philosophy. Hence why “liberal” has become buzz word to mean “civil rights and social emancipation enthusiasts”, “conservative” is abandoned to be this wishy-washy ground that evokes both a retaliatory resistance to social movements and/or a sort of nebulous (often false) vision of fiscal austerity and “communist” a brush to tar a variety of social movements with that handily has an implicit conspiracy aspect.

None of these definitions are accurate but they serve to muddy the water. That’s really the point of it. To rob us all of accurate ways to discuss political matters and to create team sport like voting blocks.

Neoliberal doesn’t actually mean " The newest Brand of liberal" NeoLibralist regimes historically have also been exceedingly anti-queer. The term was coined in the 80’s to describe a burgeoning different brand of liberal government that focused on cutting spending by privatizing swaths of the government. Think Thatcher, Regan and the modern Republican party… See also the early Nazis who historically privatized huge amounts of government to pad the wallets of their supporters but the label was applied retroactively.

If they are getting rid of government services and outsourcing them to a private company that’s “Neoliberal politics”. You are right that they are effective as an empty soda can at stopping facism but that’s because they are usually better positioned to assume power, give up on democracy and go fascist but they aren’t the group you’re calling out here.

Really the bar for what “liberal” means is a system with a basic set of rights of the person that cannot be infringed upon by the government, universal rights of the person to own stuff (though not all stuff) and a dedication to some kind of democratic system. Basically it’s become democracy’s basic format and practically everyone in government who isn’t a fascist is some variation of liberal or at least playing by Libralism’s rules. It’s not a statement on socially progressive or socially conservative rhetoric. You’re probably better off specifying " Social Progressives" if you want to be accurate to whom you’re talking about.

It’s kind of the same rules as “NeoClassisism” which isn’t constantly updated to mean the newest thing. That term got coined to specifically refer to an art style that is now 300 years old. Neo these days practically never refers to anything cutting edge.

“Toxic” has a wide range of uses outside just toxic masculinity or just describing men. One of the side effects of a very therapized society is wider recognizing that some people in your life are dragging you down because their behaviour is unhealthy for all parties. Before the reaction groomed mostly into women but men to a lesser degree was to shut up, take the abuse, take the hit to the psyche, self doctor yourself using coping mechanisms that don’t address the problem directly and endure because the pressure was on being a dutiful, selfless sibling, child, partner, parent, friend etc.

Describing people as “toxic”, while like any tool can be used wrongly or hurtfully gives people a tool to shake themselves out of that cycle. When used properly it empowers people to take their own status and wellbeing seriously when they are being taken for granted, abused or bullied so that they can source the problem and engage with people in a way that wins them their agency back. When we talk about “Toxic men” isn’t effectively any different than talking about “toxic siblings” or “toxic friends” or “toxic parents” or “toxic narcissists” The only ways it differs is in the behaviour dynamics of the group in question. These people are all uniquely “toxic” but in each of those cases you probably gain a different picture of what that toxicity looks like. Those are not individuals, they are groups within our cultures the reclassification of which is systemic. What needs to be emphasized is that in all cases nobody should be forced into a relationship of any kind, friend, family or romantic. There is a society wide push for true emancipation of the individual free to establish and demolish social ties based on the merit of the tie.

In some ways this loneliness epidemic we’re experiencing may in part be due to this renegotiation of relationships in a bid to make things better overall. One could argue the development of an expectation for too perfect boundaries is maybe a contributing factor but overall the attitude across the board is “enough is enough” and that isn’t nessisarily a bad thing. If people are not forced into connections at a systemic level they can apply consent and engineer for everyone the understanding that people either must act at the very least decently if not kindly and with respect if they want deep connection.

So much of the discussion around the subject of toxic masculinity devolves into either the idea the people critiquing the behaviour are being mean towards and victimizing men but all discussions of toxic behaviours are not about victimizing the perpetrators, it’s about advocating for better conditions for the targets.

Everyone is blaming the Dems for being everything. For pandering to the left or to the middle or to their courting of Republican voters… It’s worthless effort. The Democrat playbook has been to play by the rules which systemically support the crony capitalism status quo. The only benefit of them is that they play by the rules which means if you pressure them enough to change the rules they can be manipulated.

Realistically speaking voting them in was one point on a checklist of multiple things that needed to happen to progress and as long as the rest of the checklist is happening then it’s an ethical win. It’s not a matter of “debasing one’s morals” so long as you are doing the other things on the list. This idea of cooing over people’s reluctance to hold one’s nose and swallow the nasty pill is one I truly believe people need to get over. People should learn from their mistakes so they don’t repeat them and the pat on the head with the “You only did what you thought was right” routine is in the end not a kindness. People need to learn how the levers of power work and what is effective tactics and what are the traps that the system baits to stop people from effectively participating.

Hands need to get dirty to make change happen and not every step is a feelgood exercise in feeling righteous. It’s a boring slog of a group project. That feeling of refusal to compromise on values for any reason is the easiest thing in the world to exploit and divide people and we collectively should up the social cost of that action and teach that collectivism has it’s costs. No effective movement in the history of mankind has checked every box for every member who propelled it to success. We can all afford to swallow a few nasty pills and bank on the delayed gratification of setting up a future win because the alternative is violence which doesn’t have historically great outcomes… And yes that sometimes means somebody you don’t like gets some kickback out of it.

Inaction by deadlock of a bunch of actors refusing to properly collaborate unless their demands are met are enemies of making change. It’s just really hard to chisel past he messaging that they are not actually a noble group because so often we’re taught that absolute rigidity of every stage of praxis is the virtue by which change is made. The people who sowed that narrative were knowingly or not imparting weakness. We don’t need paragons or heroes we need people who can take tactical advantage of the natural cupidity of the powers that be and be willing to shake with one hand and hold a knife in the other.

I can understand their feelings of powerlessness in a two party system where both parties suck. Here in Canada the concept of strategic voting has been the norm for at least the past 20 years because people are aware of how shit the first past the post system is and how it forces us into a two party race we don’t want but need to compromise on to make progress. We’ve spent that time trying to make viable third parties and that has worked to pressure the Canadian version of the Democrats to court more leftist politicians for support and minority governments with three parties have caused a steady march towards a better chance at fixing the underlying issue.

But unfortunately that’s bred a backlash from people who think very much like Republicans. It was very rough watching Americans fall into a trap we Canadians have been stepping strategically around for so long.

I find this an issue when I hear people discuss this point. In the previous US election you had two candidates who were effectively capable of taking the spot. Both of them were Pro-Israel because US interests abroad have always been genocide apathetic in the face of economic gains. So you were not voting for Israel / Palistine. You were voting for which regime you would have an easier time to pressure into Palistinian support and which one could be compelled to do the least amount of damage in the meantime.

If you chose abstention then yeah, people are gunna be angry because we’re all fucking scared.

Abstention from voting as a protest measure has never worked but besides all that - It is too late now. Now instead of having space to fight against genocide abroad there’s not much space because now Americans have to direct their energies to stopping everything else from going to shit. You won’t be able to fight at all if this regime gets its way. It is time to move on and deal with the problems American’s collective choices have wrought not defend the good intentions that got us here.