HeinousTugboat

You call it "Gaslighting: The Game", I call it "My Childhood in a nutshell".

Think about the ramifications of that.

Small point of fact, but HTML is actually overseen by WHATWG primarily, not W3C. W3C agreed back in 2019 to just follow WHATWG's process.

50mL of 95% alcohol is always the same amount of alcohol.

It's not, though. Some places use ABV, some use ABW.

It works a bit better for alcohol, as that is mixing of two liquids.

Just to stress the "bit better", 50 mL of alcohol added to 50 mL of water results in 96 mL of liquid. Even ABV's defined differently in different places and is a bit hinky.

Don't forget about Ohio, where our own state supreme court decided our map was unconstitutional 5 times in a row and then just sorta gave up.

Yeah, you're definitely just projecting. Good advice, my man! Godspeed with the end of the world!

and lied to

Yep. By the experts. That do things like "research". Much better to listen to these other lies, that people that have a vested interest in the outcome want to tell me.

You know that lottery winners are more likely to go broke too, right? Did you ever wonder why that might be?

You are truly masterful at specious arguments. I wish some day I could attain your level of expertise at that. (And, for the record, that's specious with an e. Last time you tried to use it you said spacious, which doesn't make a lick of sense.)

I don't know how else to make you understand this. If you give enough money to survive to people in poverty, they stop being people in poverty. There's evidence of this all over the world, not just in the US. If people on welfare get "trapped by welfare", why does the poverty rate decline in every country that has welfare? Wouldn't it increase? How do you explain all the research that show things like UBI causes dramatic improvements in quality of life in many places?

Yes, giving a lifetime's worth of cash to someone that's been in poverty their whole life is a great way of completely destroying their life. I completely agree. It doesn't make sense to try and apply that to giving those same people a reasonable amount to survive on, though.

You’re actually hurting more people but thinking that you’re helping.

Again. Experts, research and reality all agree with me.

Taxes are certainly an issue, but just giving people money is not the answer to poverty.

There's a lot of evidence that the solution to "people not having enough money to live" is, in fact, "giving people enough money to live".

It is the perpetual poverty machine keeping people impoverished

AKA Capitalism, sure. With how much you whine about leftists, I'd assume you were all for that. A pretty major plank of conservative platforms is "hurt people more efficiently".

But for someone like me, who thinks helping people become self sufficient and get off of programs like welfare, the numbers don’t look like that’s what’s happening at all.

This has been proven not to actually help. You know what has? Giving cash to people. Just straight up giving them money. It's too bad conservatives refuse to believe that and insist on means testing everything and reducing benefits wherever possible.

There's another fun thing. One half of the people in this conversation actually listen to experts. The other half considers all experts suspect and presumes they're all politically motivated (to make them look bad, no doubt.)

And I like how you shared an article talking about how people in poverty have the highest marginal tax rate. Considering conservatives are constantly cutting tax rates, that's a delightful irony in your argument. Maybe if we quit giving ten times as much money to rich people and started using that money to support poor people, we could help them better.

Banning hate speech, promoting tolerance.

You know, "censorship" like the right likes to whine about.

the disagreements come in about what the right way to do that is.

I mean, when one side says "these things that help people are failures because they don't help enough people" and the other side says "but they're helping people", that's not about the right way.

At no point have you offered an alternative, you're simply saying "the other side is wrong" while using specious arguments to back it up.

Do you think conservatives are hatful little Devil’s just trying to hurt people?

Calling objectively successful policies failures is either extremely ignorant or actively trying to hurt people.

Again: because there's more PEOPLE than there has ever been. Yes, there is more suffering. I have no idea what you expect, the political climate is such that we can't just eradicate their suffering. But to pretend like these policies are a failure is going to cause more suffering. How do you not see that?

That 20% is the number that aren't suffering because of these policies. If you were to remove them, that 20% is the added suffering you are causing.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not.

Have they accomplished everything they set out to? Absolutely not.

Are they failing? Absolutely not.

I mean, what is an acceptable number of people living in poverty to you and when are there too many? Is it a percentage? Or is it a real number of real people?

See, in my world, percentages are real numbers of real people. I know, that's crazy. And I'm not going to pretend like there's some number that's acceptable, or enough, because that's not the point. The point is that the policies we're discussing have reduced the suffering.

You calling them a lie can only lead to more suffering. Hopefully you realize that some day.