I would even argue that it wasn't pointless. Trump is certainly the biggest candidate for the Right, but there are plenty of things that could get in his way at the moment.

And "hearing them out" is a way to show that you're not just unfairly maligning them and keeping them down by keeping them out of media that you don't want to see. It's also helping to split the Right, which is INCREDIBLY valuable.

Just because you can't think of a reason, doesn't mean there isn't one.

To be clear, I didn't say suffering, I said death and I was moreso referring to animals and how we survive.

You can cause death without causing suffering, and also the opposite.

Understood! Wasn't trying to be a dick, just adding clarity if needed.

Near Kingston! Maybe I just wasn't paying attention?

By Nine Inch Nails. Good pull!

It's not really an eye roll moment.

This is where you come in with your (certainly) broad base of knowledge that definitely knows so much more than me and explain why I'm incorrect.

I don't think the person was tying to win over left-wing people. They were voting the way they felt was right, which is how voting is supposed to work. They don't need to vote to make you happy, and they seemed very conflicted over it.

I personally agree that many right-wing policies cause misery. You're arguing like I'm right-wing and I am not.

That being said, I also think current left-wing policies are mostly toothless, focus on feelings over making the world better, are too easy on the wealthy, and are mostly preformative because the real solutions would alienate voters and donors alike - they seem to coast on "Let's not make things actively worse most of the time!"

I have never once voted for the right-wing party in my country (Canada). I also don't agree that any left-leaning party in my country is particularly great. If I were in the US, I would be presently voting for the Democrats, but only because they are the least bad of the two. I would also be stumping for third-party candidate viability as a solution to this.

you just ate up the rhetoric that BLM protesting was all “riots lasting for days”

It was vague on purpose. I'm not discussing a specific set of current events, merely commonly attached attitudes to events that have occurred throughout history. Police forces vs. protesters is a pretty common recurrence, no "rhetoric eating" required.

Nobody actually believes free markets are effective.

Well, if you'd like to actually discuss, they are to a limited extent. I also believe that the government should step in to break mon- du- and tri-opolies. If a bail out is required, the government should then own the business and all patents should be made public. Patent timeframes should also be restored to the original or shorter as all it's doing is stifling innovation. Some industries should be removed entirely from being for-profit. Now you go!

Centrists have been between the two

Maybe some. Centrists and independents are not a cohesive group with set ideals. Each individual has their own stance. It also doesn't mean that the views they hold are always between the two parties in power, but instead means that they fall between any two parties. As an example, I could be a Canadian Centrist between Green and NDP; I'm still a centrist. This makes ragging on the label kinda worthless because depending on the scale, most people are Centrists. I would be screaming at the top of my lungs about the fucking meteor in your example instead of wasting time on social politics. Yelling "Whataboutism" with things that important is fucking absurd when one means we're all going to die roasting in our own goddamn juices.

Trump

The dude sucks, no doubt. To me he represents the enshittification of modern politics, but... You can vote for Trump and still be centrist just like you can still have voted for Hillary and be a Centrist. It depends on what you value most and to what extent. There was a really good episode of Radiolab a few years back that discussed this. Basically, a legal US immigrant (with undocumented family members) voted Trump despite feeling that the man was disgusting and disagreeing with him on literally every single issue but one. The one issue they believed in so hard though, that it was enough to vote Trump (in that instance, their line was abortion). If you have a line that you will not cross, then that's all there is for some people. You can say they're wrong (and in that instance, I would agree with you), but they're neither stupid nor gullible.

This is another case of how more (and more varied) political candidates would help.

I mean, I'm 41 years old. My best friend in high school was gay. He talked about it with other friends, and I'm in a pretty right wing province.

The internet is pretty far from the only place that you can discuss these things, and the kind of parents that aren't going to give you the privacy to discuss also are definitely not the kind to just leave the internet alone and let you go crazy on it.

You're talking about extremely psychotic (and completely ineffectual methods of) helicopter parenting.

Assuming the entirety of the rest of the world beyond social media doesn't exist that is.

Oh man, do I have some bad news for you...

Plants CAN feel pain.

You not understanding the pain or finding a way to measure the pain does not mean there is no pain.

I don't understand how going to a website once a week for under 10 seconds is a detriment?