FishFace

Never mind the American planes... these planes if nuclear-armed will be armed with American-owned bombs that will require American authorisation to arm.

JAQing off and Whataboutism are not those things.

Yeah, but if you go in saying that this is the inevitable result of having conservatives discuss politics here, I am suspicious that your threshold for those terms is waaayy lower than mine.

The person I replied to originally wasn't talking about trolling or toxic behaviour, they were talking about conservative viewpoints (likening them to cannibalism, I might add) so, if you want to chip in that trolling isn't welcome then I'll certainly agree with that, but there's a reason I'm not really talking about that.

It used to be, in the early days of mass social media (and it was widespread on forums)

Moderation isn't easy but it also needn't be fraught - set standards of civility (strict or loose) and basic rules about hate speech, and let people take themselves out of discussions that are within the rules that they nevertheless don't like.

It works a lot better in small communities where you talk to the same people - you can ignore people you don't like and not have the same conversation over and over.

The high dependency ratio is going to continue to be a problem for quite a while. The time to solve the aging population problem was decades ago when their could have been policy to create budget surpluses, so that the boomer generation paid for its own care. But that didn't happen and we can't go back in time to fix it. All solutions now suck because that opportunity has been lost: you can screw the boomers by leaving them to die covered in bedsores and filth, or you can screw the younger generations by making them pay for care, or some combination.

Yeah, I am on... two forums. I think the issue is that it's not where the people are any more.

I actually think the problem with voting is that the way it's used to promote threads instead of doing it on a time basis. It's part of a way of engaging with a site which punishes long-running conversations.

What if they're paying their share/most of their share of taxes now, but a change pushes them into not doing so? These things ar enot all-or-nothing.

I don't think this will affect people's desire to have children at all (Denmark's strong social security system has a much stronger, and positive, effect on that).

I am of child-having age and my decision is based around what my life would be like for the next 18 or so years, not would it would be like at retirement. If I were to think about that, possibly having someone around to help me out and let me retire earlier would probably be a very tiny nudge in favour of having children.

The fact that you characterise natural ways of engaging in a discussion negatively doesn't mean it's not genuine, and it doesn't mean you're forced to look at it if it's available.

NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.

The structure of vote-based social media makes it difficult, and the people who, rather than remove themselves from places where arguments happen, shout down the people having the arguments, stops this from happening.

You'd be right to point out that conservative-majority spaces are just as, if not more guilty of this, but that doesn't make it less true.

The conservatives who “can’t” post to Lemmy are the ones who don’t know how to have an actual conversation and get banned.

That's true but it's not the only thing that's going on.

And you're saying this about that bastion of right-wing economic policy... Denmark? Tax-to-GDP ratio in the mid 40s, second highest amongst OECD countries?

No-one here has said that increasing the pension age is the only solution. Indeed, on its own, it probably doesn't solve the problem. But it's one part of a plan. Other parts include addressing the other side of the equation - young people, so encouraging immigration and increasing birth rates (but Danish net immigration is already about 1% of its population per year which isn't low, high levels of immigration are unpopular, and increasing birth rates is difficult and makes the problem worse for at least 18 years). Tax policy is another aspect of it, but you have to realise that having an older population doesn't mean that working population is willing or able to bear higher tax rates (even if you try to target them at the rich) That is to say, if you have a high average tax rate already, as you do in Denmark, increasing it further to pay for an aging population is likely to start having adverse effects, and it doesn't matter why you're increasing taxation.

It's probably an issue with vote-based discussions full stop. Post something funny and it'll get votes because of the laughs; post something everyone in your echo-chamber agrees with and it'll get votes because it's right-on.

Maybe I just want to go back to forums.

You don't have to subscribe to political communities if you don't want to see political discussion. But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it, that can't be fixed by individual action.

It's of benefit to society to reduce the dependency ratio (the ratio of non-working to working people)

If the number of people the government needs to support with state pensions rises, but the working age population doesn't rise nearly as much, government finances become more and more pinched