RiverDog wrote:I'm not nearly as torqued about the transgender movement as you are. Yes, I agree that they shouldn't be allowed to compete in women sports, but it's not a hot button issue with me. What is a hot button issue with me is the Dem's defund the police movement and their handling of the BLM riots. They are one step above anarchists, shirked their responsibilities as leaders just like Trump did during the Capitol riot and for much the same reason: They didn't want to take action that would offend their political constituency even when lives were at stake.
The Dems want to save the planet by not burning fossil fuels, which I am for, but they don't want to consider nuclear and want to breach existing hydroelectric dams that are cheap, renewable, and multi purpose in that they provide environmentally friendly transportation, irrigation for crops, and flood control. Their preferred alternative is to litter the landscape with large solar farms and windmills that are expensive, inefficient, unwanted by the locals, and not reliable during peak periods.
Those are the reasons why I won't ever be a reliable Dem voter. The transgender issue ranks way down my list of priorities.
I am ripe for a 3rd party, which will never happen in my lifetime. But I am not a revolutionary. These are crazy times, but we'll survive.
You must not deal with this as much over there in Eastern Washington. If you refuse to acknowledge a transgender person as a woman in every way you can be fired from your job. I'm really surprised you think it is ok to give pre-pubescent children puberty blockers like these children can make a rational decision on their gender at that age. For me it is very concerning the path this is taking along with other things.
It's one thing to ask for general respect for a life decision, which I don't mind. You want me to call you Mrs. or Ma'am or her. Fine. I can do that. I do not expect to be somehow told I'm some terrible, evil person because I consider women a real gender that you are born as and don't plan to adjust that. Or that our entire society should suddenly have to go, "Not sure what gender is. Mother's are birthing persons." That's just not cool.
We've already discussed my view on the Environmental Armageddon movement. I don't like the Armageddon Politics of climate change. The narrow focus is carbon in the atmosphere while we have a multitude of environmental issues that have nothing to do with carbon in the atmosphere occurring that all come down to too many humans stressing the environment in a multitude of ways.
Nuclear energy seems to have a lot of dangerous waste that will increase as the population increases and the more nuclear you have, the more chances of a severe event. Hydroelectric I'm not as focused on but you can only dam up so many rivers before you cause other issues, though better dam technology might ameliorate party of this. Batteries seem to require a lot of materials that will be costly to extract and manufacture.
I already believe there is no path humans have that evades the basic problem of overpopulation and no clear understanding of how much vegetation we require to balance the oxygen and carbon cleaning needs of the planet for human survival. Some are attempting to create carbon capture technology to remove carbon from the air like plants do, but they don't produce the oxygen that plants do. The deforestation, fishing, and water depletion is of great concern as well. These folks claiming we don't have too many people really don't spend much time investigating how much waste, natural resources, and deforestation and water depletion occur over a human life that will lead down the path of self-destruction because we just kept on expanding our population until we reached a tipping point not just with climate change which is the current main focus, but total resource depletion and the inability to replenish food and water supplies due to the overexpansion of humans.
Now fusion nuclear reactions if we can harness them would answer our power concerns with less waste. But a fusion reaction that goes wrong could be absolutely catastrophic. But it would supply nearly limitless cheap, clean power. Fission as nuclear power currently works is a dirty business that though calculated to be less waste than a modern power plant would increase if there were more of them including the chance of them being weaponized by bad actors, malfunctioning, and for nations unprepared to handle nuclear power pursuing nuclear power creating possibly dangerous situations at various places in the world. So not sure I would be onboard with strong nuclear adoption until the world is more settled.
Then again the world as a whole has a lot of problems that are going to be difficult to deal with and easier if there are less people. According to some population experts, we should be seeing major population drops in China by 2050. Though I have trouble believing the will drop by the 600 million estimated. But that is the estimate. If we see across the board population drops, less pressure on the environment. EV adoption should reduce the carbon release, but then we'll see how much material extraction for batteries causes issues.
A very complicated problem.