Not really perfectionism just grammar
I think the fact that using a neuter pronoun is so charged that we can’t even speak or write our language correctly is insane.
I’ve written thousands of technical documents, if you are referring to a generic operator / user / whatever the correct term to use is “they.” That’s how you say “the person that I’m referring to that I don’t know anything about”
There was a brief madness in the 90s when fucking morons used “he/she” for absolutely no reason.
While I believe in common sense gun control I think that one thing people might miss when comparing America to Finland or Sweden is just how brutal America can be.
America is an interesting country, if you can stay on the gainful employment ladder you can have a lot of creature comforts and for a few people they get to go up the ladder and have a really nice life.
That ladder though is dangling over the mouth of a volcano and there are more ways to fall off then anyone wants to admit. There’s also a ton of people just barely hanging on.
Easy access to guns is a problem, but the fact that so many Americans are so crushed by the system we live under that violence and deadly violence are things people routinely turn to is also a massive problem. For a lot of working poor the system can feel a lot like running on a perpetual treadmill stuck at full speed. We retooled our economy towards service and knowledge jobs, a lot of people in that service industry make just enough money to scrape by.
There is not a single state in the nation where minimum wage affords a 2 bedroom apartment
So you have a large number of people that spend the vast majority of their time working difficult jobs rife with customer abuse. They earn just enough money to afford a place to stay and food (and a cellphone so people can sneer at them and say, oh you have a cellphone so you can’t be struggling). Mix that with a big pile of guns and violence is bound to happen.
We can take away the guns but I suspect Americans have the ingenuity to find other ways to do violence against each other.
TIL updated my post to reflect that
“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.”—Incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog but just some random person on the internet it seems.
Still the quote makes sense even without the appeal to authority
Thanks, TheReturnOfPEB for correcting me
Based on your interpretation every group could simply be redefined into illegitimate.
Leftist think that democracy should extend into the economic realm as well and what we should do with the means of production should be governed by the people and not just whoever happens to own the capital. One way to word that would be anti-capitalist, but another way would be to word it as economic democracy.
So if you require an inclusive definition for something to be legitimate, there you go. Liberals in America do not seek to do away with capitalism, you would be hard pressed to find any that do. If you support capitalism, then by the fact that capitalism’s private ownership is mutually exclusive with democratic control of the economy, you don’t support a democratic control of the economy.
You can’t have a vegan meat eater, not because of any moral assessment on veganism or meat eating, but because those two terms are mutually exclusive.
I’ll engage with you in case you are acting in good faith.
“Helps” here is an interesting take, but not an uncommon one. There have been and continue to be a lot of people that when they see someone who has adhd or autism or some other neurodivergence think “let’s help them act ‘normal’”
If you are a neurotypical person you might even genuinely be thinking this is a good thing and in some ways it can be. Providing accommodations and life skills that are compatible with neurodivergence can make a world of difference.
The problem is that there is a long history of “help” being neither accommodations nor life skills, but discipline and shame. Here’s a thought experiment if you are neurotypical that might help.
Imagine that the world was majority autistic, since autistic individuals are the majority they consider their way of thinking to be neurotypical and you are neurodivergent. You want to do things that make sense to your brain, you’d like to make small talk and you find it very hard to stay focused during your school days 4-hour special interest hyper focus time.
Society “helps” you by telling you you are lazy and unfocused and all the normal people are able to spend 4 hours in a row completely consumed by their special interest but you keep wanting to talk or have variety and it’s very disruptive. They teach you “how to hyper focus” but nothing they say works for you, your brain isn’t wired to do this. They scold you when you don’t. They finally decide the best path would be to label you divergent and give you powerful stimulants so that you can remain hyper focused like a normal person. They “help” you.
And then one day you learn about how your brain is simply different, that you shouldn’t have felt bad all those years for being unable to do something your brain just isn’t wired to do. You realize that you don’t even really know the person that you are because your whole life you’ve been faking it, running scripts that they taught you so people won’t be upset at you, and taking chemicals to force your brain into an unnatural configuration.
Then someone comments on your post “So what you are saying is a good upbringing helps.” How would you feel?