Bridging gaps, forming strong alliances and communities, starting movements, and organizing with like-minded people for change and mutual benefit is how acceptance becomes broader and is the catalyst for culture wars to fizzle out. These actions are the spark that allow people to broadly start to realize there is nothing to be afraid about. A person who is perceivably different or a minority existing, having rights, and thriving doesn't harm anyone or have to be at anybody's expense.
Our politicians and governments no longer represent us and the laws aren't moving in the right direction any time soon. Fighting unjust laws and restrictions and winning politicians over is typically what you'd do as a minority to have your existence be legalized and protected, but I'd argue that we are past the point of no return - laws, reform, and protections aren't going to come quick enough and we need to act urgently.
The more we polarize ourselves against others for holding less than tolerant views and sitting in judgement of them, the harder it is for us to focus on joining hands, organizing, and focusing on solutions and the change we'd like to see (and be). I'm not saying that we should put up with violations of our personal sovereignty, consent to being restricted unjustly by the law, consent to being subject to abuse (physical, verbal, or any other form), or enable or platform these behaviors.
Win the battles you can win - that means focusing on solutions with people that are actually on the side of all of humanity (which includes all people and minorities). The planet and all life on it is at stake.
I feel it's ideal to be generally kind to others to hope for kindness back. Some might say that bigoted and hateful people don't deserve kindness and I'd wholeheartedly agree - you don't owe them anything and it's not your job to force their heart open. But I feel it's important to listen to our hearts and act on them - kindness has immense potential to soften hearts and dissolve boundaries - hate often has the opposite effect.
For example, do you let a person with conservative views who is intolerant, ignorant, and hateful stand in your way and eat your attention and precious life - or do you join hands with others in mutual support for progress and forward movement in our societies?
We can be an unstoppable force by moving out of the direction of the immovable objects and going beyond.
You can't effectively address those who are transphobic and racist by fighting them, shaming them, and being hateful towards them. Bigotry and hate are fueled by a lack of understanding, acceptance, sometimes by a sense of superiority, fear, tribalism, religion, propaganda, incoherence and disconnection, confusion, and of course also by hate.
Adding to a cycle doesn't break it, we need to move past these cycles of hate and hurt by joining hands with those who are on the side of all of humanity.
The people living in hate and fear who have dug their feet deep into the ground, blocking progress or even regressing it, standing with their closed hearts will catch up eventually.
Why would Islamic countries not condemn China? They certainly seem to condemn the genocide of the Palestinian people. Somebody please enlighten me.
Edit: According to Business Insider, they might fear China's retaliation (e.g. economic vengeance). How reliant are these Islamic countries on exports from China and how reliant are these countries on China importing their resources (e.g. oil)?
Why would any of that matter when people of their religion are being genocided? Fear of retaliation from a nuclear-powered state and facing consequences in regards to western trade doesn't seem to deter them from taking a stance on Palestine.
Thanks for your response. There is a lot of misunderstanding in those that hold capitalist viewpoints.
I feel some of it is not knowing any better, with some of it being confusion, and some of it is purposeful bad faith. Calling your opponents or people with views that differ from you left-wing or far-left (when in fact both individuals are capitalists) is usually an insult to dismiss them.
When people are called left-wing or far-left, usually what the person is saying about them is that they aren't as pro-capitalist as they are - not that they are socialist-leaning (e.g. such as being a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders) or in support of socialist policies.
I'm unsure if UGI has a bias towards AI corporations or capitalism, but AI could be an existential threat to markets and capitalism - especially considering the presence of open source models. For example, AI could very easily enable us to achieve libertarian socialism with none of the drawbacks as seen before in history.
I will have to check out the 12Axes test further, but I feel this could be distortion or misinterpretation of it.
That UGI chart is so flawed in terms of political lean. "Left-wing" is not libertarian capitalism - left-wing is socialism. Capitalism is a right ideology.
Maybe if you rotate the political compass 90 degrees clockwise and cut the top part out you'd be looking at libertarian capitalism on the "left" (with anarcho-capitalism on the "far-left").
And a great deal of the rights violations persist to this day, regardless of some of the treatments being viable presently to stabilize individuals.
Lifelong prescriptions are misappropriated and are too common (see Soteria Houses - they use psychiatric drugs in first-episode psychosis/schizophrenia with consent for stabilization and only for a few months to achieve remission in some individuals), people are kidnapped (sometimes in the middle of the night) and taken without due process by individuals who aren't able to assess mental illness, medicalized rape or forced psychiatry is rampant (patient choice is disregarded), there is essentially zero outside oversight, court access is wholly insufficient, you generally can't get second opinions, forced treatment orders still exist (so even when you're released you have to get court-ordered intramuscular shots), and so forth.
Some medications like neuroleptics carry a pretty big risk (20%~) of causing a condition known as Tardive Dyskinesia, which can be permanent and extremely debilitating. Polypharmacy is rampant and unregulated (some people can be on a pretty extreme cocktail of drugs).
There's still atrocities and those who fall through the cracks in the system, but there are success stories presently, which is contrasted by the horrors even in the 80's (which was fairly tame compared to psychiatry in the decades that came before it).
Psychiatry is in need of reform, and it doesn't seem like psychiatrists or the for-profit hospitals behind them are interested in enacting that serious reform.
What if locking people up indefinitely (as many were in institutions decades ago) and diagnosing them with subjective criteria isn't ideal? I'm not dismissing anybody's diagnosis or hand-waving real symptoms or illness - I'm merely suggesting that an authoritarian system where human rights are stripped with minimal outside observation (with sometimes flimsy criteria and fallible actors) is potentially damaging to mental health and is probably not conducive to healing. It can be a very imbalanced power dynamic, especially as it was in the institutions of the past as you pointed out.
We need an answer to retain the rights of those involuntarily held as best as possible. I think it's important to make courts more accessible to patients (and their loved ones), providing those held involuntarily with access to second opinions or different facilities (in some cases), and having established (and independently enforced) criteria for release - with appeals available for patients to argue their case for release with legal representation and other expert witnesses (e.g. other psychiatrists, qualified individuals directly involved in their care past or present) and perhaps even family members and other people who were involved with the patient.
Involuntary commitment (for any extended period) should be reserved for the severely mentally ill, who are determined by independent review to be in need of treatment to stabilize - and only those who are a danger to themselves or others, those who committed crimes, and those who are actively violent should be held in higher-security (locked) facilities.
I feel the rest would benefit greatly from conditions akin to a Soteria House (without locked doors, forced medication, or coercion) - the Soteria House model could be expanded, adapted, or modified. Treatment could be loosely mandated by courts, with reviews conducted and alternative treatment plans established if the patient wishes to modify or discontinue treatment before they are thought to be stabilized by their psychiatrist(s) and care team. I feel that maintaining consent, valuing patient input in forming treatment plans, and avoiding coercion is key to address certain states of trauma - otherwise patients are potentially faced with more trauma.
For those who are not thought to be severely ill, but who are thought to be in temporary crisis (and who are not thought to be violent or a threat to themselves or others), stabilization could be attempted in a temporary hold to assess their state, and continued onward with care akin to Soteria Houses or intensive outpatient care and other forms of observation and forms of support (e.g. with their environment and other distressing situations they are facing).
And to respond directly to you, I definitely feel like society was incapable or very underequipped to fix the institutions back then. Society is still largely unable to address distress and its very real manifestations or consequences - such as homelessness and the prevention of individuals from becoming homeless against their will.
Chaos, artificial scarcity, and violence feeds the system and justifies its existence.
Otherwise, why would we still have a mass incarceration system? Why is it still punitive in nature with terrible and inhumane conditions normalized?
A cycle is created that makes people unemployable and industries and those in power reap the benefits at every stage of these people's lives - any police contact is effectively a scarlet letter. Specifically, many corporations benefit from the slave labor sourced from prisons and the private prison industry is its own can of worms.
With AI tooling screening job applicants with proprietary criteria, public data brokers, mass surveillance disguised as "adtech", people search websites, social media (where people have a tendency to overshare personal details), systematic reporting of arrest records/etc. in newspapers (generally with no updates to reflect the person's current situation); you can literally be unemployable in the US with no conviction or crimes that have been expunged or sealed.
If you have a felony or misdemeanor on your record - good fucking luck getting a job in today's market - background checks are normalized and are extremely accessible to employers. It's no wonder why people turn to crime to exist, discrimination is effectively legalized - there is insufficient regulation and protections for job applicants.
The only way to prevent crime is to rehabilitate those who commit crime and to provide services to enrich people's lives before they would otherwise commit crime. We also need to respect people's privacy upon rehabilitation - we shouldn't be permanently labeling (or dehumanizing) those deemed to be fit to return to society (e.g. people that aren't violent or who aren't a threat). We have to give them a path to participate in society.
There's a whole world out there - if anybody can effectively run these models, how will they know to stop everyone?
The current US administration and sphere of influence/power may be tyrannical, but they aren't omnipresent or omniscient - even if they try to be.
For example, I highly doubt China will be able to be stopped before they burst the AI dam. Honestly, they already have - these AI companies are just in denial because they need more capital for their proprietary, inefficient, and centralized models.