frostbiker

It doesn’t matter what anyone tries to identify as … the problem starts when someone chooses to identify one way or another for monetary, social or professional gain. The problem start when the person appropriates an identity under false pretenses and then benefits from that identity and then chooses to live under that lie.

The biggest issue here is honesty

Another issue is that self-identifying in a certain way shouldn't come with monetary, social or professional benefits. Easier said than done, of course, but at least in some cases it already happens. For example, people aren't entitled to use a handicapped parking spot by merely self-identifying as having limited mobility; sports organizations have (still evolving) rules for trans athletes; etc.

Whatever we do there will always be people who try to take advantage of the system, and people who will unfortunately fall through the cracks. Part of the issue is also that many of these identities aren't binary: plenty of people have mixed heritage, or have partial disabilities. What do we do about that, and where do we draw the line? Can we have the nuance to cope with gray areas on a case by case basis? A broad consensus will be difficult to achieve in gray cases.

There will never be a consensus on what it means to “be’ Indigenous or what the qualifications are for someone to claim that they identify as Indigenous. So when we consult “members of the Indigenous community” who are we talking about?

That is the crux of the problem, isn't it? In other areas like sexual orientation or gender identity, there's a decently broad consensus that we should allow people to self-identify. The benefit of self-identification is that it discourages gatekeeping. One downside is that it doesn't change the fact that the broader community may still reject a person's self-identity. See for example the debate surrounding trans women in sports.

The issue becomes more acute when being perceived as a certain identity comes with some privileges, whether informal or sanctioned by our government. When that happens, it creates an incentive for people to self-identify in a way that they believe will benefit them in some way or another.

I don't have a solution. Just rambling.

Yeah, you are completely right, I should not jump to conclusions. At the same time, the article does show that attacks against Jewish people have increased recently.

We unfortunately have our own conflicts too.

Yes, that's what I was hinting at. We have enough domestic problems already.

We do, and across generations. But just because there is an armed conflict between two factions somewhere else, it doesn't mean we need to replicate it here. We can and should do better.

I wish people didn't bring foreign conflicts into our borders.

en ella los hombres representaron el 75% (2.982) frente a las mujeres, que supusieron el 25% (1.021). Es decir, dos tercios son hombres

🤦‍♂️ Ahí he dejado de leer.

Thank you for providing additional context. It sounds pretty reasonable.

In Germany it’s also a criminal offence to endorse or approve criminal offenses

Oh, wow! I didn't know that. At first sight, it looks like a pretty terrible approach. Can it be used to silence people who oppose a particular law? Imagine at some point the government forbids petting puppies and somebody wants defend how petting puppies is a great way spend an afternoon.

Canada has implemented a carbon tax. Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I haven't heard of it being particularly difficult to implement. As I understand it, the tax is implemented at the source, and then made revenue neutral by redistributing the revenue equally to all taxpayers.

If you burn more carbon, you pay more. If you are efficient, you get more money back than you paid in taxes.

I skimmed through the page and the linked website, but I couldn't find any specific amounts. How much do they want to tax, and whom?

The proposal handwaves that the 1% are responsible for a large percentage of global warming emissions. But if that is the problem, why not tax those emissions directly?

I’ve never heard the words “free speech” used in a context with no connection to their legal meaning. Do you have a counter example?

Yes. The very article in this post.

And when governments ignore the economic needs of everyone except the rich for too long, the result tends to be violence

Only at extremes far beyond of what we are seeing today. Other places in the world have substantially larger Gini coefficients and that hasn't translated into violence.

The US is perilously close to that now, and we’re not doing much better

What basis do you have to assert that?

D’you really want a revolution, with all the blood-in-the-streets nastiness that entails?

A false dichotomy.

We need to change the game somehow, and UBI is one way of doing it. Not the only way, granted, but the political will doesn’t seem to be there for any of the others either

You are assuming that a UBI would be beneficial to the working class. I have presented multiple reasons why that is questionable, and you haven't addressed any one of them.