Philosophical Productive Discussion

[Megamandrn001]

I'll take this as an admission that things are generally better for minorities today than even just 25 years ago.

So let's test the follow up thesis;
When you say 'fighting' and 'pressure', are you referring to physical, violent coercion to force political capitulation? Also known as 'Terrorism'?
Or are you using those in a more rhetorical sense, to describe lobbying, advocacy, promotion of a viewpoint in the media, etc?

Because one of those is the use of legitimate political power in a democracy - persuading reasonable people as to the rightness of your cause, and gain their votes, and the other is the illegitimate use of force to enforce a mandate through fear.
Of the two, which do you think takes hold more strongly in a society and is likely to last?
Being tricked or strong armed into doing what you're told, or being persuaded to reconsider things?

I mean both. Nobody wants violence. At least nobody sane and mature. And lest you control the narrative with clever wordplay, what constitutes "terrorism" is largely based on who won and who wrote things down. And I think being strongarmed is more effective, since studies show persuading people is far harder than we once thought, as people tend to double down when faced with just being flat out wrong and having to admit so instead of adjusting. This doesn't mean you go right to it, but to admit that it's never the way to go is simply ahistorical.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of instances where force was used to affect positive change, and it stuck, since once it was in place people realized it was great and accepted it. Let's lay out a couple:

The CRA and the VRA and basically the entire Civil Rights movement in general was extremely unpopular with the general American public. This is a big simplification because i'm not trying to write a college course here, but in essence LBJ was staring down the barrel of a full blown race war unless he got the government to do something, knowing full well getting these laws passed would deal significant damage to his party for decades, and he was right.

Once those laws were passed and a little time went by, they are now basically viewed as unvarnished good.

Let's do another one: Slavery!

In 1856, Charles Sumner gave one of the most impassioned speeches about the horrors of slavery and how it should be ended as soon as possible the Senate had ever seen. According to people who were there, not a dry eye was to be found in the crowd. As a reward for this, a fellow senator from a slave state beat Sumner into permanent disability with his cane, right there on the floor.

Slavery was not ended by compromise, or by persuasion, or by incremental change. There is no universe where it would have been possible to do this. It was ultimately ended by people shooting other people who wanted to keep slavery until they couldn't realistically resist anymore. And now we don't have slavery anymore, and almost everyone thinks that's good, and god I hope that includes people in this thread. Every time someone fighting for slavery was killed that was a cool and good thing that happened because it led to slavery's end. What the North did wasn't "terrorism", although I'm sure the plantation owners that got their houses burned down would disagree.

You might argue "that was then, this is now, we're more evolved/civilized, it doesn't apply" and I don't agree. This is what humanity is and will always be. I think it's funny leftists are made fun of for wanting "utopia", but it seems unrealistically utopian to me that humanity will ever create a society that won't get to a point where at some point, you'll just have to shoot some folks or else not have that society anymore. Best you can hope for is that you shoot some folks for a good cause, which, I am very well aware, is a rare and tall order. It's why nobody sane wants to ever go there if they can help it.

Many of those billionaires either made or perpetuate that wealth through for-profit medical care. Why would they be pushing for it at all?
All they have to do is say "If you want universal healthcare you're gonna have to pay for it in taxes" and chuck in some insinuation how you're also going to be paying for junkies fentanyl chasers.

If you WANT reasonable people to vote for it, you make a reasonable argument.

Let's say, "Hey, even if you really believe you can bootstraps your way out of sickness, what about people who legally can't have bootstraps? Why don't we say everyone too young to legally work gets free healthcare?"
Becomes a lot harder for someone reasonable to say they'd rather a 10 year old die of a treatable leukaemia than skip a gingerbread spiced soy chai latte a week.

This argument assumes that over 17 billion dollars a year is not spent by said unique for-profit healthcare system billionaires specifically to make the idea that taxes should pay for healthcare a ridiculous, unreasonable assertion. No other countries would hear "your taxes will pay for everyone's health care" and flip out. Only America, and this is on purpose. This also assumes that reasonable arguments for single payer healthcare haven't been made yet, and this is silly and dismissive and not worth further discussion.