Less factory works, more eldercare workers. Problems solved. Also get money from selling ever increasingly value added goods to the world.

I don't think you quite understand how steep their population decline curve problem is.

I think that's a relatively recent development (in the US, anyways). Prior to the past few decades Democrats and Republicans were parts of the same communities: they'd go the same churches, shop in the same grocery stores, watched the same TV shows, maybe played disc golf at the same courses. Recently that has measurably changed (with the exception of the disc golf situation where there probably isn't data to substantiate the argument). The amount of overlap between Republicans and Democrats in the factors that broadly constitute "identity" has fallen off a cliff.

100% absolutely. And that is a both-sides-ism. Neither side sees any redeeming values in their political opposites. There's no middle ground. There's no debate/discussion. There's no "how you feel? why did you come to that conclusion? here's why I feel what I feel" It's all insta-tribal, label and dismiss, even the moderate opinions. If you're not lockstep with their political views, you're "one of them"/"part of the problem" and dismissed. Probably the age of social media that did it, but everyone is unreasonable and rabid these days.

As supposed to the old the donald subreddit, who would ban you for even mildly dissenting opinion. The fascist censorship ideology is on the far right. The far left will engage and debate you in good faith, at least until you come back with gaslights, ad hominems, and deflections.

You're part of the problem. Let's just say the bar for labelling an opponent as a gaslighter/ad hominem/deflection is far lower than you would think. Mildly dissenting opinions are nuked all the time on left leaning subreddits. You just haven't experienced it because you don't have those opinions.

Much of the body positivity movement just says you shouldn't be mean to fat people, or anyone else, because of their body shape.

"Much" is a bit of an exaggeration from my personal experience -- that movement was very hostile and actual preaching obesity as a virtue. Like "fat pride" and "healthy at any weight". It reached a level of toxicity where people attempting to lose weight were actually shamed and called traitors by the movement for a failure of solidarity. Like I get what you're saying it should be, but that's not what it was. It's like I can tell you the Tea Party started as a sane group of fiscal conservatives complaining about taxes (and it did), but that's certainly not what it ultimately came to represent.

I guess that's where our opinions differ. The other kids absolutely can and should do something about it. All it would take is one or two of the "important" kids in the class to stand up and say "Hey, howbout you all knock off the bullshit, you're better than this."

Wow, how long have you been out of high school? Seriously, good luck with that. The ones most likely to be acting out and being self important shitheads typically were the "important"/influential kids (ala Mean Girls). The responsible smart ones were typically meek, shy, without power, and often bullied. So, short of self reflection (again, good luck), any kind of ring leading would not go in the direction you suspect.

So, for those of you into coal, why?

I don't think they're into coal so much as they're against market manipulation. Well, with the exception of West Virginia, where their entire economy is kind of built on coal.

Also, the push against coal pairs with the push against natural gas, and there's way more reasons to be against that push.

Maybe look under the large heading "Unsubstantiated claims" which lays out several examples known at the time the article was published

Please. Buried at the bottom of an article with a sensationalist headline and an assumption of truth in tone? I'm not going to hunt down dozens of more examples. I lived it. It was everywhere in the news, on every news site: https://www.washingtonpost.com...
"Key claims in the indictment, furthermore, snowballed into a big media story, raising specific concerns about reports in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and ABC News â" as well as more general concerns about how outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, McClatchy and Mother Jones handled the story."
https://archive.is/Mqz1m

Any fact checking or doubting was always a footnote or an afterthought. Often, claims of "verification" and "corroboration" of the dossier were made (such as with CNN), when they were wholly untrue. You're either super young (and hence weren't there), or being deliberately obtuse.

Now shall we contrast that with a certain mainstream American press outlet's coverage of the Biden laptop?

Please do. Find me literally any outlet other than Fox News that was reporting on the laptop with any degree of seriousness in 2020 or early 2021. You won't find many, if at all. Moreover, whatever coverage you find will be written in a way that makes the claims seem ludicrous or "russian disinformation". It wasn't until late 2021 that any news site even started taking it seriously: https://www.politico.com/news/...
That same article calls out the way it was treated when it broke: "it was unclear what to make of the alleged leak of material from Hunter Bidenâ(TM)s laptop, especially after social media companies moved to restrict access to the story and a bevy of former U.S. intelligence officials dismissed it as likely âoeRussian disinformation.â

Look, I feel like I'm just repeating myself over and over, so we're clearly getting nowhere. You clearly see no difference between one news article based on uncorroborated hearsay and spread across a wide variety of news sites for months during an election campaign, and another also based on uncorroborated hearsay that was intentionally buried for about 9 months during an election campaign, purely based on "feels". We're never going to find common ground. Enjoy your bubble. I concur Fox News sucks and I think Trump is a terrible president, if that gives you any solace. But stop believing news media is somehow "fair". It's not. Trump is right when he says the news hates him and will come after him with any shred of damaging material they have. Very often, that material has merit. In this case, it did not. But they didn't care, and they plastered it everywhere anyway.

I think you might have misunderstood what actually happened in the two examples you cited. In both cases they say the mainstream press took a more cautious approach when the reliability of the sources was questionable.

And I believe that statement is incorrect. The Biden laptop story was first broached in October 2020. The Steele dossier was around December 2016. Go check how many news reports were written about the laptop in 2020-2021. Then check how many news reports were written about the dossier in 2017. The two don't even remotely compare. The dossier was not taken with a cautious approach. The laptop was.

This is nine months after the release of the dossier: https://www.theguardian.com/us...

Where, I ask, is the "cautious approach"?

All that proves is that hindsight is 20/20. At the time the story was suspected by experts to be bogus, and in your view an impartial news media would have run with it anyway?

No, it proves that there's a difference between treating one piece of hearsay as fact and and apologizing later vs treating another piece of hearsay as fiction and correcting later, purely based on political leaning. If you don't see a difference there, I don't think anything I could say would matter here. Both of these stories occurred during an election cycle with a strong motivation by both sides to tarnish the other's reputation, so in both cases, a political motive existed. One was squashed by the media, the other was amplified. That's just fact. I don't care about "what came out of it"...I care about the initial coverage and due diligence, which is what matters here. Particularly during an election cycle. Ask yourself why the dossier wasn't "suspected by experts to be bogus"...the evidence there was just as flimsy/unproven.

To start to answer it, you first need to answer this question: "What purpose do sex-segregated sports serve? Why do sex-segregated sports exist?"

For the same reason weight classes exist in boxing. For safety (likely most important) + competitiveness. I don't even want to know how many fatalities would occur if male boxers were facing off against women boxers. Or if a male linebacker in football was bearing down on a female quarterback. People would fking die.

Sure, it's fair and accurate to characterize the response to those issues by "the left" as such, but I was talking about "the press" which did no such thing.

The press didn't amplify the Steele dossier to 11? I heard about that shit practically every week for nearly half a year. On CNN at a minimum, as that's my primary news source. And the Biden laptop story was buried everywhere, including in the press. And you also vastly underestimate the role of social media in how people receive their news these days. Social media sites effectively are pseudo-press now, since there's someone effectively filtering what gets to your eyeballs.

Just compare how the media covered those two separate issues: the Steele dossier and the Biden laptop. Because at the time of their release, they were incredibly similar: politically damaging brand new information without substantial veracity or proof. Now here's how the laptop was handled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy

Shortly after the Post story broke, social media companies blocked links to it, while other news outlets declined to publish the story due to concerns about provenance and suspicions of Russian disinformation.[8] On October 19, 2020, an open letter signed by 51 former US intelligence officials warned that the laptop "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."[9] By May 2023, no evidence had publicly surfaced to support suspicions that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation scheme.
"The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal stated that they could not independently verify the data provided by the New York Post.
In 2020, David Folkenflik of NPR observed that the New York Post story asserted as facts things it presumed to be true. He also noted that the credited lead author of the story, deputy political editor Emma-Jo Morris, had virtually no previous bylines in reporting.
Ryan Lizza of Politico wrote: "Reporters at the WSJ, Fox News, and NYP have all come to the same conclusion about these documents but they are being drowned out by bad faith activists on the opinion side at these Murdoch companies who favor Trump's re-election.

Now look at how the Steele dossier, with just as flimsy hearsay evidence was delivered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"On January 10, 2017, CNN reported that classified documents presented to Obama and Trump the previous week included allegations that Russian operatives possess "compromising personal and financial information" about Trump. CNN said it would not publish specific details on the reports because it had not "independently corroborated the specific allegations".[126][134] Following the CNN report,[135] BuzzFeed published a 35-page draft dossier that it said was the basis for the briefing, including unverified claims that Russian operatives had collected "embarrassing material" involving Trump that could be used to blackmail him. BuzzFeed said the information included "specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives".
BuzzFeed's decision to publish the dossier was immediately criticized by many major media outlets for releasing the draft dossier without verifying its allegations.[140][134][29][30][141] Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan called it "scurrilous allegations dressed up as an intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump",[142] while The New York Times noted that the publication sparked a debate centering on the use of unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources.[143] BuzzFeed's executive staff said the materials were newsworthy because they were "in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media" and argued that this justified public release

You'll note one was immediately discredited without merit and promptly eliminated from all reporting outlets until many years later when the truth came out. The other, with just as flimsy supporting information, was spammed everywhere and run in the news cycle nearly 24/7 until the truth came out.

See the difference?

Fox News started this idea that political reporting always needs to treat both sides of an issue as equally valid, regardless of how closely either side adheres to facts and and good-faith arguments.

That's a pretty extreme example and not at all where the bar is. You get shouted down by the left by even trying to have a reasonable debate over trans participation in women's sports. You couldn't have an opinion on the border (like what was 90's bipartisan policy) without being labeled a racist. China COVID lab leak theories could not even be entertained (again, racist). Biden's laptop story was buried, intentionally. The Steele dossier was amplified to 11, despite not having one credible fact in it. Etc, etc. You like to pretend the right are just bitching that loony Pizzagate or space-laser shit is the kind of stuff being suppressed, but the bar is far far lower. And you just trot out the easy strawmen to deflect.

How are they the same?

Depends on the issue. On this particular topic (media trust/control), they're pretty identical. Democrats have no respect or desire for fair and reasonable debate. They want to squash, redirect, or respin any news that hurts them politically (e.g. biden laptop) or disagrees with their views (pretty much anything during the COVID times, like lab leak, govt shutdown, kids in schools, etc). If you think these kind of tactics didn't contribute to a lack of faith/trust in media, you're nuts. And yes, the Republicans do that shit too. Hence, both sides.

The whole game has SHIFTED TO THE "RIGHT" since the 90s, gradually. One would think the accelerated rate a decade ago would make it more visible but this has proven not to be the case. People actually think there is a left shift proving how delusional and gullible people are

You're just proving kaboom's point. Your claim is just blatently false. Gay marriage is legal now. Border wall policy prior to this administration was far to the left of 90s policy, where a secure border was a bipartisan stance. Fiscal restraint/conservatism was far more common in the 90s. Green energy adoption is far left of where it was in the 90s (you know, when we were building coal plants, electric cars were dead, synthetic meats weren't a thing, and gas stoves were embraced?). Trans acceptance in the 90s was nonexistent. Etc, etc, etc. I could go on. The point is that the country has moved left on some issues and right on others. Your attempt to neatly tie everything into a box that fits your world view just proves the point that you're blind to your own biases.

meanwhile our conservatives have spent decades demonizing them as places where kids get brainwashed into thinking that LGBTQ people should be respected just like anyone else who's never done you wrong or that Palestinians deserve the right to self determination just like any other people and don't deserve to be starved and butchered in mass because a small group of them did something awful

I see in your little rant here that you gloss over the critical point: the "brainwashing" you refer to clearly is occurring. You just seem to agree with the direction its taking. Colleges used to be institutions of diversity of opinion, critical thinking, and healthy debate. That is no longer true, and that is a problem.