U.S. Politics: Death and Tax Cuts

[Martell Spy]

Top student loan official at consumer agency quits over Trump policies

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/27/seth-frotman-cfpb-resignation-student-loans-758036

Quote

 

The top official overseeing student loans at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau resigned on Monday in protest of Trump administration policies that he said were harming students and families.

Seth Frotman, the student loan ombudsman at the CFPB, said in a letter to acting Director Mick Mulvaney that political leadership at the consumer bureau over the last 10 months had repeatedly undermined efforts by career employees to take action against abuses by student loan companies and for-profit colleges.

"It is clear that current leadership of the bureau has abandoned its duty to fairly and robustly enforce the law," Frotman wrote in the scathing resignation letter, which was obtained by POLITICO. "The Bureau's new political leadership has repeatedly undercut and undermined career CFPB staff working to secure relief for consumers."

 

 

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

31 minutes ago, DMC said:

I'm not sure you can attribute contemporary China to Maoist ideology any more than you can attribute contemporary Russia to Leninist ideology.  They both have evolved quite substantially since the Cold War (and, well, in the latter case Stalin).

It's more like attributing the current American ideology to that of the Founding Fathers. Though of course there really is no 1:1 comparison between China and America or any European countries.

28 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I think it's criticizing Jace for dehumanizing the enemy and showing her how it leads to a path of badness, when so far as I can tell it leads to a path of success quite often. 

I think the issue isn't so much whether or not it is effective at what it does, as it is whether it is the appropriate tool for the job. A sledge hammer works just as well as a screwdriver at disassembling furniture. Arguably better, if your goal is speed. But you can see how in many circumstances a screwdriver is the better option if you ever want your property to function again.

So yeah, if your goal is an utter pogrom against conservatives in America, then dehumanizing them is the most effective way to accomplish that. However, assuming you'd rather coexist peacefully with our parents, neighbors, and children across the isle than wipe them out, education may actually be the way to go.

Don't get me wrong, I hold with JFK that "those who make peaceful resolution impossible, make violent resolution inevitable." But there's a difference between applying force where needed, and reducing your enemy to something less than human. One you can use an instrument towards eventual peace, the other is something that you really can't rein in once you let it out of the bag.

[Darth Richard II]

Yeah I meant they didn't exists for the entire century. Not that they never existed in that century at all.

Anyway, you're all terrible, terrible people.

[The guy from the Vale]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I think claiming all wars are for resources is an oversimplification.  I don't believe Nazi Germany went to war in 1939 because it lacked resources.  I think it went to war to further Hitler's meglomania.  I don't think the Arab/Islamic Empire was created due to a lack of resources.  I think they were really attempting to spread the Koran.  That doesn't mean some wars aren't fought for resources, simply that not all of them are fought for such.

Quite the opposite in case of the Nazis. The Nazis saw the world as a struggle of various peoples (which they usually called races) for control over finite resources. Germany in particular lacked the agrarian base to feed itself (which the Nazis sought to remedy by conquering Ukraine and turning the population into slaves), iron for steel manufacturing (which they sought in France, and which was ultimately the reason for the foundation of the ECSC, the first precursor of the EU) and oil (which is another reason for Germany's focus on the Caucasus region during WW2 - the Caspian Sea contains a lot of the world's Oil and Gas reserves). They didn't start that war just for the lulz, or out of revenge (why would they want to take revenge on Russia, anyway?), but to establish a colonial land empire similar to the American Frontier or the Russian colonization of Siberia a century earlier and that wish for a colonial empire was fuelled by the impression of having need of resources that were not directly availale to Germany.

[DMC]

29 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

You do know that those have since been shown to be complete bullshit too, right?

No.  I know one researcher claimed much of the evidence was tenuous, but even she didn't claim it was complete bullshit. 

And as an aside, as someone certified to conduct experiments on human subjects, of course Milgram's didn't live up to today's standards.  And of course they were radically unethical.  But the video is quite persuasive.  Anyway, I think you may be mistaking your classically unethical experiments.  Perhaps you're thinking of the Zimbardo (Stanford Prison) experiments.

[DMC]

11 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

It's more like attributing the current American ideology to that of the Founding Fathers. Though of course there really is no 1:1 comparison between China and America or any European countries.

Well, that kinda just proves my point.  Black people no longer count as 3/5s of a person, for example.

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

Just now, DMC said:

Well, that kinda just proves my point.  Black people no longer count as 3/5s of a person, for example.

You're right, I forgot racism ended in 2008 

But you do see my point, yes? There Framers' attitudes towards things like liberty, race, guns, etc. influence our culture and our politics to a tremendous degree, which in turn influence those of the entire world. Mao was much more recent, and his transformative effect on Mainland China far more radical and immediate.

[DMC]

13 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

You're right, I forgot racism ended in 2008 

But you do see my point, yes? There Framers' attitudes towards things like liberty, race, guns, etc. influence our culture and our politics to a tremendous degree, which in turn influence those of the entire world. Mao was much more recent, and his transformative effect on Mainland China far more radical and immediate.

No, I don't see your point, nor do I see why you feel the need to roll your eyes in the false assumption that I thought racism ended in 2008.  Frankly, I don't know what your point is.  That past regimes influence later regimes in a certain polity?  Ok, sure.  I'm not trying to be obtuse, but I honestly don't get it.  Are you saying Mao and Lenin and Stalin brought upon the world a culture - and ideology - of death as yet unseen by religious wars?  In that, I'd disagree.  They just found another method.  If it's that dehumanization is toxic in all stripes - in that I entirely agree.

[DMC]

33 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah I meant they didn't exists for the entire century. Not that they never existed in that century at all.

Anyway, you're all terrible, terrible people.

BUT, we're still fun to drink with.

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Kalbear said:

I think it's criticizing Jace for dehumanizing the enemy and showing her how it leads to a path of badness, when so far as I can tell it leads to a path of success quite often. 

Sorry, missed this.  Not arguing dehumanization can be successful.  I'm arguing, as I think Scot is, that dehumanizing the outgroup affects dehumanizing one's self. 

This is exactly why I didn't return to DC when I had the opportunity.  Most think this is the soundest political strategy, so politics is filled with craven operatives.  But that's decidedly not true.  The most successful politicians are those that express and connect hope to people.  Is that difficult to figure out?  You bet.  But it should be our aim, not shitting on the other side.

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

27 minutes ago, DMC said:

No, I don't see your point, nor do I see why you feel the need to roll your eyes in the false assumption that I thought racism ended in 2008.  

That was what's known as a joke. Sorry if I didn't make that more clear.

EDIT: For the record, i wouldn't exactly put Mao and Lenin in the same basket as Joseph Stalin.

[TrueMetis]

3 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

I disagree. Joseph Stalin killed 20 million, mostly of his own people, and he certainly believed (or at least purported to have believed) he was advancing liberal, secular philosophy. It's hard to piece out the actual philosophy of the Kim Dynasty from the propaganda on both sides of the Pacific, but it's most certainly very hostile to anything perceived as being Western, and that includes some religions.

I was reading about the last Chinese civil war recently, and one piece of information that really struck me was that when the Nationalists were falling back to Taiwan they would drape any artifacts that they couldn't pack up with slogans and pictures of Mao, because they knew that it was the only way the PLA wouldn't destroy them. And if you read about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, some truly batshit, Crusade-level stuff was done by Mao's followers, and later in his name. Mao might not have been uniquely hostile to religion, but the philosophy he pushed had strong secular elements, and in the upper echelons of the party he was most certainly a rationalist.

You want to talk about population % @DMC, this is a man whose political philosophies are still enshrined in the laws and party that govern a billion and a half people, not unlike the way the philosophies and ideas of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson permeate American law and culture. A billion and a half people. That is one out of every five members of our species.

I am genuinely curious on what definition of liberal you're using when you say Stalin was advancing a liberal, secular philosophy. Secular can be argued because there is no concrete definition of religion (Though personally I very much consider the cult of personality built around Stalin a religion) but liberal?

[DMC]

27 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

EDIT: For the record, i wouldn't exactly put Mao and Lenin in the same basket as Joseph Stalin.

Yeah I wouldn't put Lenin with Stalin.  Mao 

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

9 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

I am genuinely curious on what definition of liberal you're using when you say Stalin was advancing a liberal, secular philosophy. Secular can be argued because there is no concrete definition of religion (Though personally I very much consider the cult of personality built around Stalin a religion) but liberal?

Liberal in the sense that he was anti-conservative, at least he purported to be in the beginning. Perhaps progressive would have been a better word.

[Martell Spy]

1 hour ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah I meant they didn't exists for the entire century. Not that they never existed in that century at all.

Anyway, you're all terrible, terrible people.

What the fuck did I do?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

What the fuck did I do?

You wore those hot pink Ivanka Trump storm trooper boots at last weekend's party. 

[DMC]

4 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Liberal in the sense that he was anti-conservative, at least he purported to be in the beginning. Perhaps progressive would have been a better word.

Agree with TM on this.  His regime wasn't about ideology.  He was a totalitarian, which is not on the left-right dimension.

[Gone and Quite Forgotten]

8 minutes ago, DMC said:

Agree with TM on this.  His regime wasn't about ideology.  He was a totalitarian, which is not on the left-right dimension.

I think we're all in accord on that. Once Stalin showed his true colors there was nothing liberal or progressive about his regime.

[DMC]

7 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

I think we're all in accord on that. Once Stalin showed his true colors there was nothing liberal or progressive about his regime.

[Martell Spy]

17 minutes ago, SpaceForce Tywin et al. said:

You wore those hot pink Ivanka Trump storm trooper boots at last weekend's party. 

Make America Pink Again.