To be fair, we could probably do a lot better if we purpose-built a machine to make gold. And Pb->Au isn’t even likely the most ideal path. That was only chosen to fulfill the ancient alchemy dreams.

Personally, I don’t think we should allow any men to be president. Just of think of how absurd it is. We keep electing a bunch of testosterone-addled rage junkies to be in charge of the nuclear button. Men are just too emotional to be president, or even leaders in general. They’re just as likely to take off their pants and start waiving their dicks at each other as they are to come up with something that even meets the definition of “policy.” Electing a man a leader is like electing a rabid inbred gorilla hopped up on PCP as a leader.

Men belong in the home. That’s their rightful place. That way they don’t have to spend too much time seeing other men, which only inspires rage reflexes in them. You let two men meet and they start beating their chests and trying to assert dominance over each other, usually while stripping off clothing and pulling out firearms. Men have no place in politics, business, or any field that really matters. Men should be kept in the home where they can’t do too much damage.

But a man as president? Comically absurd. Literal clown world. How could such irrational, angry, emotionally fragile beings ever be elected a leader?

And the US still has millions of slaves to this day, completely legally. We use slaves to fight forest fires. How fucked up is that? Hell, the modern US has managed to create the absurd phenomenon of the full-time employed homeless person. Oh, and and the peak of the USSR? The US trapped millions of people in a hellish nightmare of a legally induced racial caste system.

If you ignore the slavery, the homeless working multiple jobs, and the US’s historic racial caste system, you can make the US sound utopian.

Look, reflexively saying “both sides aren’t the same” is ignorant and actively doing harm when you use it to broadly. Are both parties the same? No. But on many issues, both parties are the same. And this is one of those issues. What you are saying is demonstrably, patently false.

The South Carolina bill passed with near-universal bipartisan support.

Same thing with the Texas bill.

On this issue, both sides are just as bad. Democrats are just as bad as Republicans.

The problem Democrats have is that they don’t actually believe in anything. They follow polls and consultants, and they lack any backbone. They have no fight in them.

Look at trans rights. Democrats have completely ceded the issue to Republicans. Trans people make the walking corpses that are the Democratic leadership feel icky, so they offer only symbolic support to the trans community. Kamala, in the face of tens of millions of dollars of right wing demonization of trans people, couldn’t even offer the most basic defense of trans rights and the worth of trans lives. All she could say was, “I’ll follow the law.”

It’s really, really easy to make Democrats completely cave on the rights of any group. All you have to do is make the case to the public that it’s for the good of children. Want to ban porn? Bill it as for the kids, and the Dems will be too chicken shit to say a word against it. Want to send trans people to gas chambers? Say it’s for the kids, and Dems will vote for it. Demonize immigrants? The Democrats will try to outflank you on the right, competing with Republicans to see who can be crueler to immigrants and asylum seekers. Name the bill after a white woman that happened to be killed by an illegal immigrant, make defending it require effort, and Democrats will be falling over themselves to vote to send migrants to death camps.

Are the two parties the same? No. But on many issues, they are virtually identical. As long as you can make a flimsy case that some stripping of rights is for the good of the children, Democrats will ALWAYS be too cowardly to stand up against the propaganda. It’s been this way since at least Tipper Gore in the 90s.

The plan is to classify trans people as being pornographic by their very existence.

It’s not brainwashing though. It’s a cynical, evil, but rational attempt at race- and gender-based privilege and affirmative action. White men enjoyed massive affirmative action for the entirety of the nation’s history up until very recently. All the good jobs were arbitrarily assigned to white men; they didn’t have to compete with the majority of the population. They had an artificially-high opportunity for success simply handed to them from birth.

Racism and sexism are evil, but they’re also rational. This isn’t just dumb idiots being exploited with false promises. It’s a racial and gender group coming together and saying, “we’re going to come together and vote ourselves unearned privilege and opportunities. We will use the power of our votes to raise ourselves up at the expense of everyone else.”

Racism isn’t irrational; it’s just evil. Racism and sexism are perfectly materially rational. They’re a conspiracy by one group to give themselves unearned opportunities, power, and wealth. Dismissing it as “brainwashing” just completely misses the point of racism.

Don’t underestimate the appeal of racism. The biggest barrier to the expansion of the US social safety net is the fact that many, many white people would willingly vote to make themselves poorer, so long as they kept an income advantage over black people. Many white voters would rather vote themselves into penury rather than see one black person get any form of government assistance.

You sure about that?

1. This plan was initially discussed during the Biden administration, and Biden didn’t provide any pushback against it.

2. Democrats in the House and Senate continue to overwhelmingly support and vote for Israel, even when it is openly committing genocide.

Democratic leaders haven’t decreased their support of Israel one bit since the election. In fact, they’ve doubled down. What evidence do you have that Kamala would have been any better of this than Trump. Both parties are united in giving 100% total support to Israel. You can’t support something more than 100%. Both parties max that stat out.

In a democracy, not voting means that you are saying, “I’m fine with whoever the rest of you choose. I’m good with either.”

The Trump regime is rightfully infamous for their major crimes. But like any villain, they commit crimes both major and minor.

Among the minor crimes of the Trump regime is that I as an American can no longer tease Germans about the Nazis.

The diseases of obesity ARE solved with Ozempic. Because most people who are obese and take Ozempic already know how to eat healthy. They’re just drawn to eat unhealthily large portions of healthy foods. The root cause of the problem is that people are simply too hungry. These medications solve that issue. Fat people aren’t suffering vitamin, mineral, or fiber deficiencies. They’re just eating too much food.

You just don’t want to admit the truth, instead you demand that we magically reorganize our entire society and food industry…instead of just letting people take a pill that solves the root problem at its source.

You’re just a bigot looking for people to hate.

You’ve gone your whole life convinced that you have a moral superiority to people fatter than you are. That YOU have the knowledge. That YOU know what a healthy diet is, and they don’t. That YOU have more willpower than the slobs who have a hundred pounds on you.

But really all it is, is that you were born lucky. Or you got lucky in the foods you were exposed to in early childhood. Your satiation reflex gives you a hunger level that keeps you at a weight below that of the obese people you take such pride in denigrating. But if you were to receive the same reflex they do, you would quickly find yourself at the same weight they are.

And now, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, we have invented a way to cure these people. We have discovered the means to help millions, to extend lifespans and healthspans by decades.

And you can’t stand it.

Because, now all those evil fat people are going to be a healthy weight again. And how will you know who to cast your judgments upon then? Those damn lying, dishonest, evil fat people! Now they’re hiding their fatness from you! They aren’t any more moral or willful, they’re just hiding their evil!

There is something rotten in your soul.

Additionally while GLP-1 can reduce caloric intake, it doesn’t actually fix the poor dietary choices that got you there in the first place.

This shows an ignorance of how obesity actually works. The primary difference between skinny people and fat people is that fat people are just hungrier. Skinny people have functioning satiation reflexes, while fat people’s have been damaged, likely from exposure to highly processed foods during childhood.

Have you learned nothing from the effect of GLP-1 inhibitors? For years, people have been demonizing fat folks as lazy and ignorant, smug in the self-satisfaction that their superior character and intellect could save them from that fate. And now we’ve apparently learned to bottle willpower, to condense “good dietary choices” into an injection. People take these medicines, and suddenly they find themselves drawn to eat a healthy amount of food, and to eat less sugary and refined crap.

This shows beyond any doubt that people were not making poor choices. They didn’t lack willpower. They never had any fundamental character flaws. They just had a broken metabolism that forced them to crave unhealthy levels of unhealthy food. We give them a shot, and somehow this profound flaw in their moral character just vanishes into the wind.

Obesity is a medical problem. It’s not an education, a willpower, or a character problem. We have tens of millions of people who have had a core part of their bodies - their satiation reflex, poisoned and damaged by the food industry. And instead of helping them, we declare their poisoning to be a moral failure.

You have learned nothing.

Go back to 8th grade and relearn the scientific method. Pay attention this time.

There’s something very wrong with that study design. Look at the actual questions they asked: https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/2921c434-f7d7-43f4-ade6-3a5591444c85/downloads/83704423-9e76-43d7-a876-975f4a267df1/12-24 Interview Schedule.pdf?

Look on page 10.

36. Anti-Zionist movements are antisemitic by definition: 70% say that describes their beliefs well or very well
37. Anti-Zionist movements are not antisemitic by definition: 50% say that describes their beliefs well for very well.

Then items X3: 53% disagree with the statement that opposing Israeli government policy is antisemitic.

Or Item 42:

It is possible to be a strong supporter of Israel and also protest their attacks that lead to the harm or death of civilians in Lebanon or Gaza. 74% agree with this statement. In the next item 68% state that Israel will only be safe when a two-state solution has been established.

The sample that “The Jewish Majority” used was likely wildly unrepresentative of America’s overall Jewish population. This can be seen in their question on religious service attendance.

Only 20% of American Jews attend service monthly or more frequently. Meanwhile, the 37% of The Jewish Majority’s respondents attend service at least once a month. (Item 47.) This indicates that their sample severely over-represents highly religiously active members of the Jewish community. Their report doesn’t state how they recruited their sample, but it seems likely they did so through outreach at synagogues or other spaces that would select for the most religious and heavily practicing of American Jews.

Only the most vile of antisemites conflates Zionism with Judaism. Antisemites believe that Jews are fundamentally foreigners, regardless of where they are born or how they live. An antisemitic American believes that Jews have an intrinsic loyalty and connection to the state of Israel, and any criticism of that hard right government is an attack on Judaism itself. To antisemites, Jews cannot be true Americans. Their loyalty is always suspect. This is the logic of the Japanese internment camps in WW2.

This logic states that if relations between Israel and the US are good, that attacks on Zionism are to be fought as an attack on all Jewish Americans. But this logic also demands that if relations ever sour between Israel and the US, persecution of American Jews is fully justified, as Jews cannot be real Americans.

Yeah, everything is a communist plot, eh Senator McCarthy?

Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. Nobody cares about genocide? No, you simply don’t care about genocide. Enough people cared that it cost Kamala the election. And if Democrats don’t reform their ways, they will never win the White House again. Kamala went against the wishes of her own constituents and put loyalty to Israel over the needs of her own country.

No that’s just wanting to look younger. Again, not every cosmetic treatment is gender-affirming care. Hell, it’s pretty ridiculously to even use the term outside the context of trans healthcare. Musk looked male before and he looked male after. He just thought he looked better and younger with more hair. It had nothing to do with gender.

Just listen to yourself. You appropriate the language of a minority group. Then when actual member of that group comes along and tells you you’re not using it correctly, you double down and try to tell them that you know their own language better than they do.

The reason I push back on this is because the distinction between gender affirming care and general cosmetic treatment really matters. This shit kills people. Men who want hair plugs don’t have a 40% suicide attempt rate.

This watering down of language for cheap political points has very real consequences for the trans community. Right now our rights and healthcare are under attack. Hard won victories decades in the making are being rolled back. Among the targets of these attacks are conservatives trying to bar health insurance companies from covering gender-affirming care. And that case becomes much easier if the distinction between trans healthcare and every cis person that wants a minor cosmetic treatment is watered down.

This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s fighting against the casual appropriation of our language that threatens our rights and lives.