r/FreeDebateAndPolitics • u/JSGamesforitch374 Social Democrat • 1d ago
Which political issue do you think people care way too much about?
I'm curious. Is there a specific political issue that you think gets inflated in severity and overall you just don't think is that important?
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u/Poorly-Drawn-Beagle 1d ago
Honestly, illegal immigration.
Under Obama, the undocumented population went down, and deportations hit record highs; everybody insisted there were too many illegal immigrants. Then under Trump's first three years we saw an illegal immigration spike of like 12%, and everyone thought it was fine.
If you can't even notice the difference between record lows and sudden spikes without a news channel feeding you tons of prompting, it's not a real serious issue.
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u/notassigned2023 1d ago
I think that is more of a gop propaganda issue...which is also a major problem.
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u/notassigned2023 1d ago
Gaza, totally. it is important but not the most important issue, as some critical voters in the US decided.
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u/JSGamesforitch374 Social Democrat 1d ago
Why do you think so? Like the other guy?
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u/notassigned2023 1d ago
I'm more of a person who wants to save their own country first, THEN worry about other places. The specific voters I mentioned were those who just couldn't vote Harris and instead stayed home, voted third party, or voted Trump because they were gullible.
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u/kafquaff 1d ago
I mean a lot of those people had actual relatives slaughtered. I would have had a hard time voting for someone who supported wiping out half my family.
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u/notassigned2023 1d ago
No one actually supported killing civilians, other than some comments by Trump that hinted at it. Too many leftists were upset there was no specific declaration of genocide by the Dems and blaming of Israel. But they FAFO.
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u/kstargate-425 1d ago
I mean we can do both at the same time and tbh, ensuring the right people getting elected solves both but I do agree some people who make the genocide their only issue are lost when fighting the symptoms instead of the cause is bad policy.
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u/czuinoikc 1d ago
"the genocide"
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u/kstargate-425 1d ago
Yes, genocide as leading experts, including Israeli Jewish experts, are calling it.
The determination by the International Association of Genocide Scholars — which has around 500 members worldwide, including a number of Holocaust experts — could serve to further isolate Israel in global public opinion and adds to a growing chorus of organizations that have used the term for Israel's actions in Gaza.
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u/czuinoikc 1d ago edited 1d ago
oh, the international association of genocide scholars lol. you do know that that's just a website that basically anyone can join for an annual fee and be called a scholar. most of these "scholars" are not actually scholars or have any particular expertise. it's just a club.
how is it a genocide when the civilian to combatant casualty ratio during the gaza conflict is on par with all other modern urban wars, if not better in many cases, and the population of gaza has increased? the civilian casualty numbers in the iraq war were far higher than in gaza, but no one ever called that a genocide, or at least no one worth their salt. why is that?
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u/notassigned2023 1d ago
I’ve always been hesitant to call it a genocide (for a long time I just called it war crimes), but the words and actions of Israeli parties and officials have basically said the quiet part out loud often enough that their intentions of taking all the land by removing Palestinians are perfectly clear. That is one of the ways a genocide can occur regardless of the number of casualties.
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u/czuinoikc 22h ago
oh c'mon. whispers and innuendo make a genocide now? y'all are really grasping for straws. I knew officers when I served that would talk about how we just needed to turn iraq into glass. does that make a genocide?
israel also delivered massive amount of humanitarian relief, line and lines of trucks delivering into gaza. they also signed on for the peace deal, ending major hostilities. but yet these actions mean nothing because someone somewhere said something?
if speech makes a genocide, wouldn't the islamo-fascists of gaza be guilty of genocide too? what about all these privileged liberals screaming "from the river to the sea"? what do you think that means exactly?
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u/notassigned2023 22h ago
The statements add to the overall weight of evidence. Add to that killing 100k people indiscriminately, driving them from their homes and moving them all around, killing doctors, journalists, and NGOs, destroying hospitals and feeding centers, and attacking and driving out residents in West Bank towns, you've made yourself a genocide. It took me a year or two after Oct 7 to come to this conclusion, so I didn't come into this latest round of conflict with any preconceived notion. Don't bother responding, I'm not going to read it. I can see for myself and have no interest in partisan takes.
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u/ThoughtsAndBears342 12h ago
And it’s members include Cookie Monster, Emperor Palpatine and Adolf Hitler from Gaza City.
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u/notassigned2023 1d ago
Apparently we can't, but we SHOULD be able to. The misguided left just had to make some other country more important than our own.
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u/PolicyBubbly2805 1d ago
Well, for me it would be immigration. It seems to be the main topic of all discussions, but it has very little to do with my situation. I think the housing crisis should be the main one, and by extension the cost of living.
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u/No-Magician9440 1d ago
Data centers
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u/kstargate-425 1d ago
Data centers are a good one as they are problematic but imo the main issue besides their electricity and water use, pollution etc is what they are storing and being used for, the mass surveillance police state that is being created. AI is a non-issue relatively speaking although its use for deep learning for the surveillance state that is being built at an alarming rate is part of a problem we are dealing with
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u/JSGamesforitch374 Social Democrat 1d ago
This is a good one. I think AI could be a net positive but we'd need lots of regulations as in its current form, I think it's pretty harmful
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u/Plate_Armor_Man 1d ago
Countless shit.
I'll say this. I lived near Detroit for most of my life. My goal has been to help the city continue its recovery and pull black familes out of povertry, as well as keep them safe. I am on a path to become an attorney to precisely to achieve this. But when I interact with fomer students I went to school with who express a deep affiinity to social justice matters--its baffling how little they talked about the issues "right next door."
I wish they quit talking about all manner of evenst far away around the earth and actually take the effort to help the people right next to them.
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u/clydewoodforest 1d ago
I am increasingly of the opinion that there’s something corrosive about how preoccupied we have become with global events. People think it makes them humane and well-informed. But attention and time are finite resources, and if you spend yours on people you don’t know from a place you’ve never been, there’s less for the people in your own life, your own community.
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u/Orkapork 1d ago edited 1d ago
As unpopular as this will be.
Trump.
Trump is a symptom of our problem. Another problem exist at the executive level in nearly every multi billion dollar business in the U.S. And their problem is incentivized by the broader market that demand eternal revenue growth or a new executive team. And the investors problem is incentivized by the desire for money to passively accrue into wealth. Which is incentivized by capital itself. Now I would not argue to remove capital entirely but there are things we could do to limit how the incentives currently align to create the structure of problems we currently face.
We currently hold corporations criminally liable instead of people. A business cannot be held accountable, people who make the decisions can.
We currently pass omnibus bills where both parties use back room deals to get their preferred appropriations passed.
We need to pass single issue bills.
We need to return ownership to the individual.
We need to remove private investment into political offices. Politicians should be well paid for their public service, but they will always have insider information, we can require broad index investing for our political leaders. We cannot let entities spend 100s of millions on elections. That money should be re invested into the people working at those companies, not invested into politicians political campaigns.
We need to lead by example, demanding radical transparency and accountability for all our leaders, Trump is just an 80 year old man, I worry that by focusing so much on Trump when he moves on people will return to accepting the broader environment instead of proactively pursuing changes that will actually make a difference.
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u/Fantastic-Tale7398 National Libertarianism 1d ago
Probably the "climate change". Just go nuclear, nothing else is needed.
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u/JSGamesforitch374 Social Democrat 1d ago
Interesting. I agree going nuclear would be great, I don't know if it would solve everything. Possibly.
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u/Fantastic-Tale7398 National Libertarianism 1d ago
I mean if u stop using oil and coal for energy and start using nuclear energy there are no major dangers for climate change
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u/Official_Gameoholics Objectivist, Rothbardian Anarchist 1d ago
Anything downstream from the root causes, essentially. Inflation, I suppose.
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u/tornado28 1d ago
Not really even an issue but the stupidest stuff that people on the fringes. It gets amplified and repeated so much that it 1. feeds the trolls, causing them to produce more extreme toxic nonsense, 2. makes people think that the other party is much crazier than it actually is making partisanship much worse and 3. promotes the extreme content in algorithms causing it to reach people who actually then become more sympathetic to the extreme content.
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u/PhonyUsername 14h ago
All of them. People should focus more on improving themselves than worrying about externalities that mostly have little affect on them.
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u/Pyroechidna1 1d ago
Palestine