I was a lurker on Reddit. I had less than 500 Karma when I deleted my 12-year-old account a couple weeks ago.

I’ve already been more active on Lemmy than I was my entire time on Reddit. Everything here just feels more genuine.

So if I’m forced to argue with them, I make sure I’m the one having fun.

I can respect that. If they’ve proven themselves to be ignorrogant, there’s no reason to get all flusterfucked trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I’ve dealt with enough people who use trolling as their primary debate strategy that I guess I got shit-triggered. Apologies, friend, for assuming the worst.

Psh, yeah, if you want the easy way out!

Seriously, though, it boggles the mind that there hasn’t been a stronger push for ranked choice voting. Of course the establishment parties would do their best to suppress anything that might help unseat them, but you’d think the disenfranchised millions who feel no strong affiliation to red or blue would be pushing harder for it. It’s not perfect, but at this point, I think most would agree that a major change is necessary if we ever want to Make America Kinda Okay Again™

I honestly can’t imagine any movie being as perfectly terrible as The Room. It gets even better when you start to look into the director/lead actor/writer/producer, Tommy Wiseau. I’m fully convinced that he’s either D.B. Cooper or an alien. Maybe both.

this seems to be mostly a Right wing attitude

Let’s not make this political. Right wing and left wing are still part of the same bird. They used to move in harmony, balancing each other, but for the past few years, those wings have been either attacking or ignoring each other. The eagle is in free-fall, and it’s mindsets like this that keep it from course-correcting.

But what about the children? Won’t somebody please think of the children?!

Sounds like this is more of a debate about semantics. “Whataboutism” is a recently-popularized term that doesn’t have a concrete definition yet. You see it as a tool to escape a debate by diverting attention, but I see it as a tool to highlight hypocrisy while continuing a debate. Really, I guess what matters is context - specifically, whether one is attempting to debate “in good faith” (another recently-popularized, inconsistently-defined term).

I certainly don’t know you or your personal relationship with your dad. He doesn’t sound like a great debate opponent, but to be fair, neither do you. Most people aren’t nowadays, sad to say. Somewhere between Trump and Biden, people forgot how to wait their turn and debate the idea, rather than the person. It takes two to tango, they say, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find two individuals who are able to set aside their egos and listen in earnest to opposing beliefs.

I guess I’m a bit biased. 2020 turned me into a misanthrope. 🤷

Not on hand, no. I looked into this a decade or so ago, took measures to ensure my family’s health (reverse osmosis water filter), then forgot about it. If you do decide to look into it yourself, you’ll likely find lots of claims that it’s beneficial when ingested, but you probably won’t see any studies showing more than a correlative link between dental health and municipal water fluoridation. It’s not exactly hidden info, so a quick Google search oughta get you the results you need.

Sad, but true. But also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone was well-informed and voted for who they really felt deserved the position, regardless of party affiliation, we wouldn’t be in this mess. But that would also require that everyone actually spend time researching each candidate, and most people don’t have the time/mental capacity for that.

Thinking more on it, maybe this was always the endgame of representative democracy, especially when mixed with unregulated (for the last few decades, anyway) capitalism. Even if everyone spent hours researching each candidate and chose truthfully, we might have a small resurgence of third-party representatives in positions of power for a short while, but people would inevitably move towards two polarized parties, anyway.

So I guess our only option now is to tear it all down and start anew. Or maybe just wait for the AI singularity to happen, then we all either die horribly or live forever in paradise. 🤞

Never said they were. But they are both inescapably corrupt any beholden to their corporate masters. Democrats are just better at pretending to care about social issues.

A vote for either party is a vote against progress.

Right, you’re a pro-fluoride nutjob ignoramus.

If you spent even five minutes reading about it, you’d understand that fluoride has no proven benefits when ingested, but several proven adverse reactions.

Being a republican first-party voter. Sure there are some educated grifters who decide to label themselves as republican or democrat, but your average republican first-party voter is a mouth-breathing fucking idiot. terribly misinformed.

FTFY

Honestly, in your example, you sound like, as you put it, a dumb cunt. The purpose of “whataboutism” is to point out hypocrisy in your debate opponent’s position. Your dad pointed out that a politician on your side did something equally deplorable to the one you’d called out on his side. Rather than respond to that and have a reasonable conversation about the nuance and differences between your chosen politicians, perhaps coming to better understand each other, you chose to devolve to nonsense, intentionally killing the conversation. That screams poorly educated (but possibly with an expensive education that makes you feel superior enough that you don’t bother to question yourself and your ideals).

Time stops for everything that isn’t you, including air. You leave a vacuum everywhere you go and can never stay anywhere for long.