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U.S. Politics: Having a Good Time


Morpheus

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16 hours ago, karaddin said:

Apologies for picking on you here OGE, but I've seen this come up a few times. Why on earth should we be treating each set of interactions as a blank slate? I can't speak for any of the others, but I certainly gave plenty of slack and a lot of time before I decided it was utterly clear that ME systematically defends the rights of nazis with significantly more vigour than he does the rights of minority groups. Other conclusions about where sympathies lie swiftly followed. I mean, yeah I do write people off on the first interaction plenty of times, for example another poster in this thread was very clearly someone whom was never going to be convinced from their first word on the subject and I don't see any point in treating them as a reasonable neutral party. Instead arguments with those individuals become about what the argument says to those who are reading it but not involved, and yeah - I'm sure sometimes missteps are made there too.

I'll just point out that where whining about racism against white men merely got ridicule as the dog whistle it is, Seli (I think it was Seli?) got a very different response from me when looking to genuinely engage in the discussion.

But the guy that thinks you can't use violence against Nazis until they're personally collecting you for the camps? Fuck that noise. Just look at how he tries to play it down, dismissing it as a crazy guy on a milk crate in the subway. They have taken positions of power throughout your entire government, and are engaged in dismantling your democracy - including having put a guy on the SCOTUS that is now campaigning for the GOP. They are very effectively destroying the supports of democracy like trust in the press, trust in reality itself for that matter. They are arming up the police again, because they know the police are on their side - the military is not looking so certain. They have formed a highly cooperative international network across the western world to share people and intel, and are engaged in growing their movements across the board. Its not the US, but for fucks sake there are Nazis in the Reichstag again.

If you can take a look at the world right now, at the start of October 2017, and think the imminent threat that Nazis are posing not just to minorities but to the continued existence of humanity - through the POTUS they have the largest stockpile of nukes in the world and that unstable asshole is threatening to wipe a country off the map with them - is equivalent to a doomsday prophet in the subway, then you have a fucking agenda you're advancing.

Yup - Ye ole Bayesian analysis.  Gotta take into account them priors.

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43 minutes ago, Week said:

No, thankfully. I can only imagine the elevated discussion to be had.

He’s spent pages arguing that LeBron is an overrated, one dimensional player. The unanimous opposition to his arguments are like the only thing that’s ever united the regular posters.  We’re at the level of Pats and Jets fans hugging in a tender embrace, longingly stroking each other’s face.

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1 hour ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

 And indeed, it's the same for guns. You want to hunt? Sure, that's a legitimate reason to carry a gun into the forest. You shoot for entertainment? Sure, just store your gun at the shooting range and you're fine. But buying guns to hurt or kill people (aka "self defense") really shouldn't be seen as a legitimate course of action.

But then, that'd imply people obtaining gun licenses, training and only getting their hands on the guns they need for the task they want to do... and you can't have that in the USA, apparently.

Yeah, I agree totally. I've never understood this mentality. It's like what happened to you that makes you feel it necessary to carry a gun or say have a gun in your car? I couldn't live like that. 

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 Trump Upset That NBC Didn't Verify Tillerson Story With Him

 http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/353990-trump-hits-nbc-news-over-tillerson-report-no-verification-from-me?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

 

/Why are you going to bother to verify facts with a pathological liar? You reap what you sow, Donnie. Your word is less than worthless at this point.

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2 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Is there any good reason to carry a bomb outside of intending to use it? If you're not military personnel transporting it to somewhere it needs to go, why the fuck are you carrying a bomb?

You're still not answering the question. Speculating the reasons as to why a person would carry a bomb is irrelevant. Ser Scot A Ellison criticized the logic of the argument, "don't blame the gun, blame the shooter," where he concluded that it's similar to the legal carrying of a bomb. The person's intentions don't matter. If they do, then Ser Scot A Ellison's criticism needs revising.

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

He’s spent pages arguing that LeBron is an overrated, one dimensional player. The unanimous opposition to his arguments are like the only thing that’s ever united the regular posters.  We’re at the level of Pats and Jets fans hugging in a tender embrace, longingly stroking each other’s face.

Oh gawd, I must be trolling then. Arguing against the orthodoxy that Lebron James is the best player should automatically earn me a one way trip to the gallows. It couldn't be that your reactions are just a manifestation of your group mentality and that my being new here subjects me to relentless pressures to conform to your beliefs? Nah, that's too complicated. It's simpler to call me a troll.

By the way, what would you call someone who goes into a U.S. Politics thread and rehashes a discussion he and someone else had over sports? (I wanna say troll, but we've already established what trollish behavior is.)

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18 hours ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

 

I would ban guns, given the opportunity. But as I said upthread, this would require a magic lamp at this point. 

It would require something even more rare and difficult to obtain, a constitutional amendment.

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[mod hat]

We now have a separate thread on gun control in the United States. Please direct discussions on that topic to that thread. 

Thank you. 

 

[/mod hat]

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25 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

 Trump Upset That NBC Didn't Verify Tillerson Story With Him

 http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/353990-trump-hits-nbc-news-over-tillerson-report-no-verification-from-me?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

 

/Why are you going to bother to verify facts with a pathological liar? You reap what you sow, Donnie. Your word is less than worthless at this point.

Yeah but how fun will that call be.

"Mr. President, can you verify that S.O.S Tillerson called you a Moron of a f@#king Moron?".

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5 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

That would be hilarious.

Some people say the best moron, doing incredible, incredible work.  He's a miracle really. Here, have some paper towels. 

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1 hour ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

Yeah but how fun will that call be.

"Mr. President, can you verify that S.O.S Tillerson called you a Moron of a f@#king Moron?".

For sure.  I'd be calling him every day and asking him those kinds of questions, just for fun.

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So, per Huckabee Sanders,it is impossible for a president to undercut a SOS or any cabinet member because he sets the agenda. The whole thing with shitting on diplomacy last weekend? It wasn't publicly humiliating Tillerson, it was merely Trump outlining his agenda.

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55 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Trump Reacts to Water Purification Demo in Puerto Rico

 

Try to squeeze out an ounce of human empathy from a narcissistic sociopath is harder than trying to get a spoonful of water out of a rock in the middle of the Sahara. 

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On 10/4/2017 at 11:17 PM, Mother Cocanuts said:

So in the case where a minority proposed that you had a "rich daddy," were you dominant?

Okay, I think I know where you are trying to go with this. It’s basically because there was no power dynamic between myself and the other individual in question, the prejudice + power definition of racism fails.

But, I thought, perhaps, it was understood that we were talking about aggregate effects and not always about the random encounters between two individuals. So lets reformulate a little and say its prejudice + power + aggregate effects.

And I think if you don’t think there are no aggregate effects, it would require a degree of wishful thinking, even if we could hypothesize particular situations where their may not be a particular power relation when two random individuals meet and interact.

On 10/4/2017 at 11:17 PM, Mother Cocanuts said:

Where does it conclude that it's "white dominance"?

You know though, they controlled for a bunch of stuff that should be able to explain the wage gap. But even after controlling for this stuff, they still found a large gap, that really ought not be there, after controlling for relevant variables.

Here are the relevant paragraphs.
 

Quote

To understand what drives the black-white earnings gap, it’s important to consider the factors that influence wages. Economic theory tells us that workers’ earnings should largely be a reflection of their productivity; this component can be measured indirectly using data on characteristics such as age, education, and industry/occupation. Other measurable factors that have been found to be important include where people live and their part-time status. Finally, factors such as institutions, historical pay norms, discrimination, and the effects of public policies like the minimum wage (Fortin and Lemieux 1997) can also affect pay, although they are far more difficult to measure.

Economists generally use a statistical method known as regression analysis to separate differences in pay related to observable factors from those related to other harder-to-measure factors. Figure 2 shows the results of such decompositions annually from 1979 through 2016. The black line plots the average percent earnings gap in each year, and the bars show the contribution to the gap from each factor; we include observable measures of differences in age, education, industry and occupation, state of residence, and part-time job status. The red portions of the bars show the part of the gaps unexplained by these factors.

Now, given, the history of this country, along with a big “unexplained” part in the wage gap, after controlling for a number of relevant variables, we ought to be mighty, mighty suspicious that a bit of racism or prejudice, or its pernicious historical effects, are in play here. 

Also, did it ever occur to you that differences in school quality or in career opportunities are likely due to the effects of racism? I mean particularly after controlling for a host of factors that should explain the pay gap, but don’t.
 

On 10/4/2017 at 11:17 PM, Mother Cocanuts said:

Which question does it beg?

Here is what you wrote:

Quote

As for incarceration rates, well.. black people on average make a huge portion of the populace in poor, downtrodden, and crime-ridden areas. It would stand to reason that the representation of criminal perpetrators would reflect that as well.

Did it ever occur to you that reason for this stuff was because of racism?
 

On 10/4/2017 at 11:17 PM, Mother Cocanuts said:

Oh believe me, I'm "trying."

I’m not sure if listening to about four hours of Fox News every day counts.

On 10/4/2017 at 11:17 PM, Mother Cocanuts said:

And that's stupid. If we are to operate on "prejudice + power" whites couldn't be racist toward Asians, and Hispanics couldn't be racist toward blacks. I'd rather use the original definition.

Call it green eggs and ham, if it makes you feel better. More important, in my estimation, is that you get the concept. When prejudice is combined with political and economic domination, it’s going to be far more damaging than your garden variety prejudice. And when overt prejudice and power act for a very long time, it’s pernicious effects can linger around for quite awhile, even if we did some civil rights bills back in the 1960s.
 

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