ExecutiveStapler

I agree you used chauvinistic to mean that, but you then followed it up by saying that you didn’t have to justify why what they said is wrong. You do. It’s also not the case that what they said was definitionally chauvinistic, although I’ll let that slide because it was something similar enough.

Suppose it was the case that one nation was in every way better than all other countries. Shouldn’t the citizens of that country be proud of that? Beyond pride, shouldn’t they do everything they can to spread their glorious system to the world and bring prosperity to all? That doesn’t necessarily mean wars and colonialism, that simply means all soft power efforts to implement systems that show themselves to work. I think the answer to this hypothetical is this nations citizens should feel pride and should spread their system.

The key point here is the United States isn’t better than every country in the world, thus Americans shouldn’t feel such extreme pride about their country. However, the United States is pretty good. I think some form of pride / patriotism are justified for Americans and even forms of soft power to implement effective policies are justified, but this answer is impossible to reach when you throw out all feel good thoughts about nations as chauvinistic.

Ah, what a great example of a thought terminating cliche, a statement that does what it says to save you from cognitive dissonance and nuance. You are clearly using chauvinistic as a pejorative, so you need to either justify how they’re wrong or take it back and stop muddying the waters with your empty ideological language.

To be clear, I don’t necessarily agree with op’s statement. The US as a developed nation clearly has more opportunities and advantages than developing nations, but there are other developed nations that meet and sometimes beat the advantages the US brings. I’d argue the US is at least in top 3 of being the most successful nation in diversity and global influence, but other nations have better welfare programs, housing policy, and cultural aspects imo.

Lord of the Flies was written by a sad man who had problems with humanity. I didn’t react that negatively when I first read it, but I also definitely soured with time.

Something interesting is that a real life lord of the Flies has happened. Spoiler: they don’t kill each other, they delegated roles, took care of the injured, established food sources, keep a fire burning for more than a year, and eventually got rescued.

Human nature isn’t merely brutish, pushing people to murder their neighbors because they just felt that way uwu, instead it’s some combination of rational and tribal. We do good by our tribe, we want to be accepted by our tribe, and we often unfortunately define ourselves in opposition to others tribes, whether they be real tribes in prehistory or Xbox vs PS4. However, people don’t murder people over their chosen console, they’re rational enough to realize that’s beyond stupid and meaningless. Children stuck on a island have enough rationality to realize half of them dying is less hands able to work on group projects, and that rationality transcends whatever base tribalism that might energe. The past 20000ish years of history has had people rationally define themselves in gradually bigger tribes, from village to city to religion to nation to supranational identities at different times and in different places. WW2 didn’t solely happen because humans bad and tribal, it happened due to complicated ideological breakdowns of rationality (among other things of course, single causes don’t result in world wars) that otherwise would’ve had the Germans and Japanese realize that prosocial cooperation with their hated groups would’ve had better outcomes for all.

Yeah it’s 90% compassion and 10% argumentation. Seeing things from their perspective, seeing the aspects they like and not immediately placing those aspects into the good and bad buckets, but instead truly appreciating how those aspects work for them. Of course, then you need to figure out how to advance your position over theirs, but that exhaustingly starts in compassion.

Yeah it’s incredibly difficult, that’s why the majority of people never change their ideology past their early 20s when they first flirt with several. Add in the fact that you’ll likely be socially ostracized from your old community if you ever do change your mind and the evolutionary pressure to be accepted over being logical, and it’s quite frankly impressive anyone ever does.

The first step to changing someone’s mind is acknowledging that you probably won’t be able to. The other commenters are right, the red pill is stupid, it’s annoying to argue with them, and you’ll probably fail the delicate act of ideological conversion. Still want to give it a shot? Great!

Depending on how deep down the rabbit hole they are, the answer is it could either be impossible or it’s a long term dedicated effort. First you should learn a bit about cult deprogramming techniques, as while the red pill isn’t really a cult it is an echo chamber ie. a mostly comprehensive view of the world that has built in answers that insulate from external dissent. The red pill tends to provide community, some degree of lifestyle improvement, and a feeling of secret insights into society / the world, and it’s very rare an individual will give those things up for the sake of something as abstract as logical consistency.

You need to slowly provide alternatives to whatever positives the red pill provides, which while annoying is possible because the red pill sucks. The online sense of community is tenuous at best, so be their friend and connect them to other friends that’ll entirely replace that aspect. Additionally, the lifestyle improvement aspect is rather generic and can come from anywhere. Ask them what specific red pill people they follow and provide a gym / motivation YouTuber that better provides whatever motivation the red pill gives.

The final element is the feeling of insight into the world that the red pill gives. This one is ironically the least important to changing someone’s mind and the most difficult, as in order to successfully provide alternatives you likely need to understand the red pill ideology better than they do. Nothing a red pill person says should stump you, you should have heard it beforehand and researched it and thought of better counter arguments. If they mention hypergamy, you should have annecdotal, theoretical, and statistical answers ready to go. You should know their ideology well so you can make annoying jokes about how ridiculous it is when applied to real life.

If you do these things, over enough time and done diplomatically enough so they don’t leave you for a friend that doesn’t annoy them, you can probably depeogram a red pill person.

Another answer to your question is that it’s fundamentally misguided due to your assumption that good and evil are absolute concepts and that there can’t exist separate and consistent moral worldviews. Consider the historical crusaders joining a brotherhood of Christ to save their holy land from the infidels and secure safe pilgrimages for millions of their fellow Christians, and then consider a Muslim warrior defending his homeland and family in the name of Allah from crazed zealots of an imperfect prophet. Who is good there? If you asked them, they’d both say they’re the good one and the other is the evil one. They’d both say the reason they KNOW they’re the good one is ultimately due to insight into the moral fabric of the universe granted to them by God (the same god, funnily enough). Ultimately, it’s impossible to say absolutely which one is right without appealing to something like divine revelation.

Another assumption I think you should reconsider is your implied stance that good people are necessarily absolutists in their principles. You say the good people wouldn’t use nuclear bombs, but why? Nuclear bombs have ushered humanity into the greatest and longest period of peace in human history. You say the good people would never use torture, but why? I agree with other commenters that for practical purposes torture is nearly always useless and inhumane, but suppose a hypothetical hemophobic (and Evil!) nuclear terrorist that you’d just need to barely cut (light torture!) and then he’d tell you the secrets to his dastardly plan to bomb an orphanage. Are you sure that a good person would be obligated to stand by as the orphans explode instead of giving that guy a pinprick? Suppose the “good person” sticks to their principles and lets the orphans dies, what should they do to the terrorist? This guy’s really evil, he spits on puppies and doesn’t even feel bad about it. You also know with 100% certainty that he’ll never reform, Doctor Strange told you so. If so, wouldn’t it be more moral to just kill him? Why waste resources on his useless imprisonment when it could be spent on thousands of mosquito nets saving thousands of nonevil lives from malaria? Also, why is he evil? Suppose it’s even 1% likely that evilness spreads through genes, if the good guy knew that and let him have kids wouldn’t it be partially the good guy’s fault if his nuclear terrorist baby bombs another orphanage? Perhaps you have satisfying answers to all these questions, but if you don’t you just justified the torture, killing, and eugenics-ing of “evil” people.

Ultimately, the impression I want to leave is that ethics are hard and complicated and most certainly more nuanced than a good and evil divide. There exist counter arguments to some of the things I said in this comment, but I’m guessing exploration of those counter arguments would leave you with a more nuanced view of good and evil regardless.

Who trampled on the Russian tomatoes? (Don’t say the Nazis, they trampled on everyone’s tomatoes including their own) For Russia, there was some small scale support for the whites during their civil war, but otherwise trade between the Soviets and the west increased year by year during the NEP period until Stalin purposely contracted it (if someone knows more about this period, feel free to correct me. I’m working off of information I learned in classes years ago and this article that matches with what I remember). I’d propose that the Soviet issues were internal due to blindly ideological governance that crippled their economy and society. They didn’t have to make such an insane number of nukes, create the culture that caused Chernobyl, nor invade Afghanistan.

Otherwise, who trampled the Mainland Chinese tomatoes? They basically won their civil war, their only issue was blind allegiance to chairman Mao that resulted in disaster after disaster. The West didn’t force them to try the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Down to the Countryside ‘Movement,’ nor the One Child Policy. The CCP did those to themselves, and they only found success once Mao died and they made their economy more capitalistic.

And then once more, who trampled on the North Korean tomatoes? At the beginning of their war, they tried to crush the South’s tomatoes until a UN authorized force pushed them to the Chinese border and then a Chinese force counterbalanced to the current borders, but otherwise the North was economically better off once the stalemate began (the Japanese centered their industrial developments in the north). North Korea failed because of dramatic mismanagement and a ideology of constant militarism while the South, with ups and downs, prospered.

Sure, there were military actions, police actions, and garden trampling that harmed both sides during the Cold War, but you can’t just blame your enemy for beating you, you have to recognize why you lost.

Any rational capitalist (or more realistically, mixed market supporter) should agree that other systems are theoretically possible, and should probably even support small scale scientific tests of whatever people want to realistically propose.

This already happens with tests of UBI occurring all over and examples of coops existing in many places as well. UBI is too new to say but looks promising, and coops seem great in certain areas of the economy if properly supported but not optimal everywhere, as far as I’m aware.

However, if someone thinks their system can only work with absolutely everyone in society participating after a revolution where the sinners (whoever they are) are eliminated, they really ought to recalibrate their beliefs or join a militia if they’re really serious.

Gesturing vaguely at everything is not an argument for anything. Supposing the person you’re talking to agrees that everything is bad, then it’s simply an argument for radicalism, not necessarily anticapitalism or whatever your particular strain of belief is. Someone could, while gesturing vaguely, just as easily argue that it’s because of moral decline, that society isn’t capitalist enough, for race realism, for the need for a strongman to take over, or really anything that’d promise (but almost certainly not deliver) to vaguely fix everything.

You are misusing terms, a stakeholder is anyone affected by a company’s actions while a shareholder is anyone with ownership in a company. All shareholders are stakeholders, not all stakeholders are shareholders.

Oh shit the seatbelts are a great example, I’d maybe add that typing on a keyboard is another thing that feels habitual. Everywhere else the 3 month rule applies pretty well in terms of maybe picking them up and randomly immediately dropping.

Can a neurotypical chime in and say whether seatbelts and typing are habits to them like brushing teeth?

If you genuinely accept critiques of Iran, China, and Russia as well as disliking the West’s capitalism then you’re just a communist, not a tankie. However if you just kinda accept critiques in a “No one’s perfect” kinda way but still cheer when Russians shoot Ukrainians, you’d be a tankie who fell for Russian propaganda. I’d recommend looking into the firehose of falsehood, it informs a lot about certain righties’ and lefties’ perspectives.

Other people have given good answers in terms of the structural and financial reasons, but if you want to see an alternative there’s the example of this region of Italy where there’s a substantial number and % of coops. I believe this is due to preferential taxes and subsidies by their government, although I haven’t looked into it nearly enough to say anything conclusive.

Other people have given good answers in terms of the structural and financial reasons, but if you want to see an alternative there’s the example of this region of Italy where there’s a substantial number and % of coops. I believe this is due to preferential taxes and subsidies by their government, although I haven’t looked into it nearly enough to say anything conclusive.

It seems like this study doesn’t say anything about ADHD or Adderall. All they gave out was caffeine or placebo and they either told the participants they were getting caffeine or Adderall. So all the study really concluded is that if (a neurotypical) college student was fooled into thinking they took Adderall where they really took caffeine they’d perform better than someone who just took caffeine. Which just seems like proving the placebo effect.