And updating regulations to promote building denser housing in locations people want to live!

Entitlements is a weird one. A person who wrongly believes they are entitled to money/power/respect is “entitled” in a derogatory sense. A person who has paid into the Social Security and Medicare programs for three or four decades is truly, genuinely, entitled to the payout of those programs.

And Republicans believing entitlement programs are bad, when so many of them are dependent on these programs to maintain a basic standard of living, is an astounding level of doublethink.

I could use some history learning to give me hope for a more progressive future. Do you have some examples of corrupt parties burning out I could research?

Once we are confronted with a situation that extends past our moral gray area and into firmly awful territory, nothing beyond that point is any deeper shade of gray - it is all equally morally black. So person A with a wide moral gray area sees a thousand people on the path to senseless death, and an alternative path of senseless death for two thousand people, and finds one thousand deaths a reasonable choice given bad options. Person B with a narrow moral gray area sees the same options and no moral difference - both choices are equally morally black. They rail against the options and see no value in trying to reduce the deaths by one thousand, because that’s not enough to bring the situation into their moral gray zone.

“We need to be cautious!” would be much more compelling if the standard medical approach to trans minors was not already immensely cautious.

The standard may be cautious, but a significant number of individual clinicians are not. But pointing out that a concerning number of care providers have looser-than-standard medical approaches gets the speaker attacked as a traitor to the cause.

Bolding mine, quite from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/transgender-youth-skrmetti/683350/

When red-state bans are discussed, you will also hear liberals say that conservative fears about the medical-transition pathway are overwrought—because all children get extensive, personalized assessments before being prescribed blockers or hormones. This, too, is untrue. Although the official standards of care recommend thorough assessment over several months, many American clinics say they will prescribe blockers on a first visit.