This ties into a bigger issue where almost nothing related to sexuality can ever be healthy or normal to many conservatives.

Sex to these conservatives is inherently deviant and filthy. Making conscious life decisions related to sexuality or sexual identity will never be just a life decision. It will be equivalent to actively engaging in sexual acts.

Being trans to them is actively paedophilic because it exposes children to the concept of sexuality and gender. Sex ed will be paedophilic to them because it does the same. Each person’s actions are not the sole thing that defines them, but also their position in society as dictated by “what it has always been”. Men have always led households by marrying women and having kids, therefore men that don’t are a threat.

Conservatism is quite black or white when it comes to things like identity or introspection. It is an ideology that very frequently wages war on self questioning and exploration in exchange for compliance and conformism. It’s why many conservatives hate universities, scientists and partially why they hate immigrants. The entire ideology grows by appealing to people who do not want to be intellectually challenged. It’s especially attractive to those that don’t want to understand other ways of thinking.

Conservatism as an ideology always exploits the greatest potential weakness of the left wing: naivety, and presents itself as the “responsible” or “reasonable” solution to a reckless and harmful left wing. They frame things like empathy and humanitarianism as weaknesses rather than virtues.

It’s why most of the conservative rhetoric revolves around “being taken advantage of” or “being scammed by” this or that group. They love stories about immigrants exploiting the system, cheating or stealing because it proves their worldview that what’s foreign and unknown is out to get them. It is an ideology driven by fear.

And the biggest problem is that, unlike progressivism (which also has its ideological vices and weaknesses), conservatism never seeks to help the weak or empower the vulnerable. Instead it seeks to maintain the hierarchy and keep people in their place. In the US that translates to keeping immigrants weak, keeping black people down, keeping women in the kitchen, keeping white men ahead, keeping the US as an imperial power, and keeping its allies subservient.

But then if poverty is the best predictor for crime, that begs the question why would any country want people who are inherently more prone to crime in the first place?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to precisely discourage that type of immigration if you were trying to bring crime down?

The thing about Japan is complex for several reasons. On the one hand, late payments only affect your PR application if they took place within the last two years. So it’s not like you’ll be perma-banned from the PR if you paid your National Health Insurance slip late once because you forgot.

But if you do pay late consistently, that’s when it affects your PR. And again, you need to be consistent for two years to be eligible again.

Interesting! Thanks for the fact check. I always assumed giving money away would at best just be a temporary bandaid solution since you need a stable income to actually get out of poverty.

Of course, this isn’t a problem with a stable UBI, I imagine.

Nah man, I’m poor as fuck right now, I barely make minimum wage, but I properly file my taxes and you know what? Because the system in my country is good, I don’t have to break the bank to do so either.

Fraud, debt evasion, tax evasion etc are not a consequence of poverty and instead do affect all other people who do things right. You can’t benefit from tax money and from the system if you’re actively cheating it.

The reality though is that most millionaires and really rich families and people aren’t really the main problem with our current system.

Even if your family had tens of millions of dollars available while you were growing up, you’re many orders of magnitude closer to a minimum wage worker than to any billionaire.

The reality is that if most societies redistributed a fraction of the wealth of their top 30 wealthiest individuals, almost no one would be harmed and thousands of people could benefit significantly.

Now, of course, if you just give money away, that’s no good at improving people’s lives, so it makes sense to use the money to fund hospitals and schools, to provide adequate conditions to the disabled, the elderly, single parents, the homeless and our most vulnerable. And oh, would you look at that, that’s just a tax reform.

I’m from a middle upper class family, so, I never lacked any necessities but I also couldn’t afford luxuries every day. But I hold no contempt for people who got to grow up living in wealth and luxury beyond what my family could afford. I hold contempt for people who could dramatically improve their entire communities’ conditions and choose to evade their only tax obligations and only invest their wealth to accumulate more and more.

I think societies should at some point put a cap on wealth. No human being should be as rich as Elon Musk.

I think no one will condemn this because everyone sees the Israeli government as a bigger issue than even Trump. Which is quite naive.