SuddenDownpour

I actually disagree with this sentiment.

There's clearly a split in the Democratic Party regarding the candidates and leanings of the old guard, vs a very large portion of their voter base that wants structural reforms in the country (universal public healthcare VS increased access to insurance, for instance), and I bet a large portion of the latter feel whipped into having to vote for a lesser evil rather than for a political project they actually have passion for.

Meanwhile, Trump was an outsider of the Republican party who managed to get their voters in love with him, to the point that he managed to hijack the party and leave it ripe open for a transformation from neoconservative to proto-fascist, despite the Republican old guard initially being hostile towards him.

The Republican party has managed to stay competitive, despite their political goals being less popular overall in the US than the Dems', precisely because they allowed themselves to mutate and stay responsive to the changes in the electorate, the obvious tragedy being that democratic institutions (mostly referring to both political parties) have been far more willing to incorporate far right nutjobs who want to end democracy than they have for left-wing populism that wants to make housing affordable.

Not that I've thought a lot about this specific issue, but I just want to mention that intersex babies have been receiving surgeries for decades in order to make them conform to the majority, far before they were capable of having or expressing any opinion on the matter. So I'm going to be really skeptical of people who oppose trans teens requesting surgery when they themselves have been asking for it, and they have the support of their doctors, as it just looks like the fact that they're straying away from normativity makes a lot of people apply an unfair double standard.

As with most issues the truth is in the middle and any immigration policy should absolutely demand that any immigrant coming into a country assimilate and fully support our values of equality for all.

First generation migrants tend to be, in most receiving countries, less likely to commit crime than native-born population.

http://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/Bersani_2012.pdf

They found that immigrant men and women were less criminally active than native-born men and women in regard to self-reported crime, being stopped by the police, being charged with a crime, and having contact with a criminal justice agency. This pattern of lower levels of criminal activity among immigrants compared to the native-born held in models controlling for key background characteristics including a variety of educational, employment, and family history measures.

The problem comes with latter generations, if the receiving country isn't doing an adequate job at integrating them. If the parents work really long hours, aren't capable of spending much time with their kids, have trouble to pay kindergarten and have trouble teaching their kids the local language, if the kids are victimized by racist bullying at school, have less means to do well academically and land a good job, and are generally otherized by society, they're at a larger risk getting alienated and engaging in antisocial behavior and even crime.

So, if you don't want migration to be a problem, invest in public schooling (including kindergarten), offer classes teaching the local language to adults, empower unions, protect labor, and fight racism.

This reminds me of the Zizek's perverted joke. NSFW warning, also somewhat distasteful:

My man was just self-medicating his migraines and his ADHD.

Enough talk about trans rights, it's time to talk about trans wrongs /s

She gave us 4 years of Donald Trump.

Yeah, after Labour washed down their agenda until making it unrecognizable.

The (Tory) king is dead. Long live the (Lite Tory) king.

Contemporary governments deal with taxation, healthcare, security, defense, education, law, labor rights, minority rights, infrastructure, prison systems, regulations of industries, and so on and so on and so on. It's very unlikely to find one person capable of having in-depth knowledge of all of these areas to properly defend their party's leanings on all of them in parliamentary debates, and even if you did, those parties are still going to need experts who draw the master lines of their policy proposals, and those experts need to be paid.

Move along, this is just "Israel defending itself" (according to countless Western politicians as they justified their support for Israel).

If you aren't voting for one specific person to be your representative, but rather, for the party as a whole, you generally want individual representatives to follow the party line, unless there's some sort of unusual drama that splits opinions long after the last elections.

In countries such as the US and the UK, you usually vote for one person to represent your territory, but in elections such as the European ones, because you're voting for lists of people to represent your country, you're actually voting for a party.

No idea about how Australian democracy works, though.

Maynarkh said that Cuba has been under US sanctions, and also that US sanctions started the Japan-US conflict during WWII. Gravitas has misinterpreted it, intentionally or not, for it to mean that US sanctions on Cuba started the Japan-US war.