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streetlamp posted:I get emails from Students for Life because when I was a member of our campus Voices for Planned Parenthood group, we would watch them just to see what was happening in their little crazy world. Most of their emails are pretty bad but this one is so over the top. The problem here is that there is confusion because the professor and the woman from Students for Life are talking about two different concepts using the same nomenclature. She is talking about biological life, in that, yes, a zygote is alive after fertilization and will (likely) be born about 9 months later, but the professor is talking about personhood, i.e. when personhood attaches after fertilization. She is conflating the two while the professor is making a distinction. He's not denying that a zygote is alive or that it's human, he just doesn't think being "alive" like a zygote is the sole quality required to be a person. El Boot posted:Well, some idiot I think I went to high school with just posted this to Facebook: What is it with these "not racist" people and not understanding what a hate crime is? It's not simply when there is a disparity in the race/sex/religion/ethnicity/sexual orientation between criminals and their victims, but rather when a crime is committed because of that disparity, i.e. had the victim been of another race/sex/religion/ethnicity/sexual orientation or the same as the criminal, the crime would not have occurred. E.g. had Trayvon been white, it seems unlikely that Zimmerman would have called the police in the first place, let alone stalked him and gotten into an altercation/shooting. These examples cited aren't hate crimes even by the admission of these people who are implying that they are. They are explicitly noting that these criminals in the second example were motivated by wanting to rob their victim, not that they killed her just because she was white and they were black. Mooseontheloose posted:My guess is they went to jail and stood trial, you know the way the system is suppose to work. That is the heart of the Trayvon case at the end of the day. Bingo. So many people that are "outraged" by the legitimate outrage at Trayvon Martin's death don't really understand that the latter group isn't just mad about the circumstances of his death, but also that the police have been biased gently caress-ups at every stage. Orange Devil posted:It's racism. The worst was Newt Gingrich Fuckface Gingrich posted:"It's not a question of who that young man looked like," he said. "Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified, no matter what the ethnic background. Is the president suggesting that, if it had been a white who'd been shot, that would be OK, because it wouldn't look like him? That's just nonsense." RagnarokAngel posted:Unlikely. Schizophrenia almost always manifests around 20, not much earlier or later (and if he's claiming to have fought in the gulf war I'm assuming older?) and "word salad" is usually even less comprehensible than that (Even if it's absurd the point of discussion remains consistent down to the last sentence, male homosexuals think they're girls and vice versa. That's not even an uncommon opinion). While you are correct that the profile for schizophrenia is the onset of symptoms during a patient's late teens or early twenties, it's not unheard of for symptoms to manifest significantly earlier or later than that. In fact, the latter cases of early actually correspond to significantly more severe symptoms, less responsiveness to currently available treatments, and worse prognosis. Here's a famous and incredibly sad case: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-schizophrenia29-2009jun29,0,4834892.story
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Apr 6, 2012 12:36
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KillerJunglist posted:I usually get stupid jokes with tons of animated .gifs from my mom in Fwd:fwd:fwd:fwd form, but she sent me this one today: My cousin tells jokes like that in person.
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Apr 8, 2012 07:13
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Shasta Orange Soda posted:I bookmarked this article 3 years ago because I had a feeling I'd end up linking it a lot in the future. I was right. Good articles, but the comments on the first are terrible. I've only read part of it but All the Devils Are Here is also a good resource, and I've also seen several interviews with the authors of the book. Interestingly, they show that a significant portion of those subprime loans that ruined the economy actually weren't given to people getting mortgages on their first homes but rather people taking out second and/or third mortgages on homes they already own. So, it's less about people getting "homes they couldn't afford" and more about people mortgaging their homes because of the inflated valures of the housing market to support lifestyles they couldn't afford.
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Apr 8, 2012 10:51
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Nibbles141 posted:Government oversight would have stopped what was happening, regulations already in place had to be loosened to allow banks and other institutions to leverage themselves so heavily. That's the part that gets to me, when people act like their interpretation of something is the only legitimate version, which is especially common with capitalism, religion and the Constitution. I'm really loving sick of hearing people critical of unregulated capitalism be labeled as "Marxists," people critical of conservative interpretations of the Constitution (e.g. originalism) labeled as anti-American or anti-Constitution, and those who don't subscribe to a conservative form of Christianity dismissed as not being Christian at all.
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Apr 9, 2012 13:25
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Iceberg-Slim posted:Wow. Attacking Fred Rogers? Can they get any lower? How about pissing on MLK's statue or taking a poo poo on Rosa Parks' grave?
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Apr 10, 2012 06:55
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Dr Christmas posted:The tribalistic, spiteful, reptillian part of my brain that doesn't care about raising the level of American discourse wonders what would happen if MSNBC or CNN did an ad campaign that of a Daily Show-esque montage of the endless torrent of indefensible poo poo that flows from Fox News, the stuff that moderate conservatives would stop and blink at, like Glenn Beck's "You gotta shoot them in the head," and "the Muppets are Communist propaganda" stuff," and ended with a cheesy tagline like "No hatred, no lies, just news." To me, "raising the level of discourse" requires that we point out bullshit when it happens, but just not pulling the same bullshit as the people you are criticizing. Look at Edward R. Murrow, his reports about Joe McCarthy were scathing and extremely important in getting McCarthy censured and ending McCarthy's witch hunt. Murrow used McCarthy's own words to show how absurd and outrageous McCarthy was, and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report do pretty great jobs emulating Murrow from a comedic/satirical perspective. I think your idea is great, but I think many conservatives will simply write off MSNBC/CNN airing it as Fox News rivals simply trying to "steal" viewers. It would probably work much better as an independent internet campaign from someone who doesn't have a financial interest in Fox News being exposed as liars and partisan ideologues. RPZip posted:
poo poo, I couldn't remember when that picture was from, so I used TinEye to find it and discovered this gem with all the false "D-" attributions from Fox News.
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Apr 10, 2012 09:19
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cbirdsong posted:Here's a good chart they aired just a few months ago: I'm really curious what it is like to work behind the scenes at Fox News. Do the people that work there realize how blatantly dishonest and partisan they are being and they just don't care/feel justified in doing so because of the rest of the "liberal media" OR do they just convince themselves that these are honest mistakes that no one is doing intentionally and believe that everyone there is motivated by a commitment to facts and news from a conservative perspective? I mean, I'd really like to know how these people deal with the blatant misrepresentation of facts by the on-air personalities and the obvious opinion and partisanship in what are supposed to be news segments. Does Roger Ailes rule with such an iron fist that only someone as popular, successful, and well-paid as Shepherd Smith can even approach being openly critical and dissenting from the party line? Are all these behind-the-scenes production staff just trying to keep their jobs, causing them to tolerate this bullshit or do they drink the Kool Aide too?
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Apr 10, 2012 13:42
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zeroprime posted:Someone that worked in journalism mentioned on here that they try to hire the true believers, and that severely limits the talent pool. You get a mix of intentional mistakes and a much higher rate of unintentional mistakes, plus a management/editorial staff that is too incompetent to catch a lot of stuff. Ah, so it's like the Justice Department under George W. Bush that would almost exclusively hire from fourth-tier law schools at conservative, fundamentalist Christian universities like Liberty university and Regents university so that the DoJ would be ideologically pure.
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Apr 10, 2012 23:40
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Shasta Orange Soda posted:It was over $4 in the summer of '08, and then rapidly dropped to the lowest it had been in years by January '09, and then slowly climbed back up again to the present, where we're finally almost at summer '08 levels. The problem is that people are just looking at the price they pay at the pump and not at all at the other factors influencing gas prices. The price per barrel of crude oil hasn't changed much compared to the price of gasoline, so it must be some other factor influencing gas prices. What causing all the current volatility is almost entirely blamable upon commodities traders who are speculating on what the price of oil will be, causing the current price to skyrocket. Thus, the gas price volatility is actually a product of the lack of regulation on Wall Street caused by, you guessed it, conservatives. Kavak posted:Is this thing trying to spin increased unemployment benefits as a negative? I don't really know if I'd even call Libya's conflict a war. It's not like there were any US soldiers on the ground in Libya, we were just blowing poo poo up from naval vessels each time it looked like Gaddafi was going to massacre a bunch of civilians.
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Apr 11, 2012 11:52
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pillsburysoldier posted:yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh I guess purges like that don't happen often do they Well, generally, when a new presidential administration takes office, they frequently do a bit of house cleaning and remove people in high-ranking administrative roles (e.g. attorney general, assistant attorneys general, etc.) that were appointed by the previous administration to make room for their own choices, but the DoJ dismissal controversy under Bush was exceptional because they were explicitly political firings of high-level bureaucrats (in this case, US attorneys) for not trumping up false investigations, grand juries, and charges against political enemies (mainly Democrats) OR for investigating political allies (all Republicans) during election season.
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Apr 11, 2012 12:37
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PerniciousKnid posted:Also the S&P rating doesn't mean anything because: sovereign debt ratings are stupid, the market doesn't react, the US is still borrowing at 0% anyway, no other rating agency downgraded the country, S&P is bad at math, it's constitutionally illegal/impossible for the US to default, a US default would wreck all your other investments at least as much... take your pick! Also, S&P published an editorial several months before the downgrade basically threatening to downgrade US debt if the Obama Administration didn't do everything the then-ongoing Simpson-Bowles committee recommended, as the committee was supposedly leaning in favor of all the things S&P wanted.
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Apr 12, 2012 12:55
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Laserjet 4P posted:It came from Facebook: And this is the exact problem with Paultards. All they do is pay attention to the quick soundbites they hear from Ron Paul's TV appearances, but they don't actually investigate his whole platform or even the entirety of a single issue, and they certainly don't pay attention to reasoned criticisms of Paul and his policy positions. They just shut down at the first sign of criticism and accuse Paul's critics of being "statists," neo-cons, socialists, etc. They hear, "The Drug War is bad and we should end it" and think it means he wants to end drug prohibition and legalize weed, but Paul is actually only in favor of ending the federal drug war. He's perfectly fine with the states continuing their 50 individual drug wars, leading to minimal change in the status quo for most Americans, especially since most searches and arrests for possession happen at the states and local levels. They hear, "Let's audit the Federal Reserve" and think it means that Paul wants to increase transparency at the FED and give Congress more oversight, but what Paul actually means is the end of the Federal Reserve entirely, basically no regulation of the banking and financial sector other than prohibiting government bailouts, and returning to the goal standard and/or letting each state print its own currency if they want.
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Apr 13, 2012 12:32
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Laserjet 4P posted:This came from Michele Bachmann's feed I wasn't referring to the image, I was referring to the last part where you wrote, "The most frustrating thing is that it takes 3 paragraphs to show what bullshit a single-sentence soundbite is, and by then, you've already lost the person you were arguing with."
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Apr 13, 2012 13:02
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Z-Magic posted:I can't believe you would say such a thing about an 86 year old woman who struggles with dementia! Did she really credit Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew a democratically elected leader in a military coup, with bringing democracy to Chile?
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Apr 14, 2012 04:22
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VideoTapir posted:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/304516.stm Yeah, that's how I understood what she meant even before you posted that. It's pretty classic paternalism from our western imperialism. The only legitimate governments are the ones that are puppets for western powers, even if they are fascist states (e.g. Cuba, Panama, Iran, Iraq, Chile, etc.). What was hilarious to me was when my conservative friends and relatives who supported the Iraq War would talk /email me about how we needed to get rid of that tyrant Saddam and bring democracy to Iraq, all I'd have to do is send them that picture of Rumsfeld smiling and shaking hands with Saddam in the 1980s. Sporadic posted:Here's the thing I don't get... No matter what he does, Barack Obama can't win with these people. He's in a perpetual catch-22 where he'll be criticized no matter what he does. If he sends federal tax dollars to all the midwest flood victims, he gets criticized for subsidizing the bad decisions of Americans who chose to live on a flood plain and increasing the deficit, but if he doesn't send money, he gets criticized for being heartless towards their suffering and potentially even a racist because most of those flood victims were white. Where was all this outrage from conservatives about New Orleans during Katrina? If he gives foreign dignitaries modern, yet personalized gifts that are relatively inexpensive (e.g. DVDs, personalized iPods, etc.) then he's criticized as lacking class, being dumb, and even "being ghetto" by more racist conservatives, but if he gives them some really fancy and expensive gifts then he's criticized for being a kleptocrat who is using our tax money to send gifts to his liberal European friends. If he doesn't bow to the Saudi King or the Emperor of Japan, he gets criticized as lacking class and being disrespectful to our foreign allies, but if he does bow to them he gets criticized as submitting to foreign powers. Where were these conservatives when Bush literally kissed the Saudi King and walked hand-in-hand with him?
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Apr 14, 2012 09:14
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Kosmonaut posted:Big mistake number two. This is supposed to be a science professor? And he doesn't straight away point out that cold is the absence of heat? This setup could never happen the way it does in the forward and the student would be left looking like an idiot. The "darkness" argument is more of the same. But darkness, in practical terms used by most humans, isn't necessarily the absence of light, just an absence of light from the portion of the light spectrum visible to humans. It could appear to be pitch black out with absolutely no light, but there could still be extensive infrared and/or ultraviolet light available. Kosmonaut posted:What in the gently caress is this even supposed to mean? God is magic so science can't understand him? And that's supposed to convince anyone he's likely to exist? Don't forge that it's just flatly wrong in terms of science. Neurologists and psychologists have explained what thoughts are by explaining how the brain and neurons work, including which areas of the brain contribute to which aspects of thought, mood, behavior, etc. We can also see electromagnetism through things like arcing electricity, Tesla Coils, ferromagnetism (Wooly Willy loving rules), etc. Just because you're not observing something like a thought or electrons with your eyes doesn't mean you can't actually observe a phenomenon with your other senses or observe the effects of those phenomena. The professor needed to ask to this retard student whether he believes gravity exists even though he can't see it. Kosmonaut posted:Actual professor: I guess you'll just have to base it on the empirical evidence that I am a human and all humans have brains and therefore deductively I must have a brain. Or the fact that I'm standing here breathing and talking. Or the fact that I have a doctorate and you're a smug little prick who thinks he can disprove science itself by talking out of his rear end. Also, the professor could take them to a hospital or outpatient neurology lab and have a PET scan and/or MRI done so that they could actually see his brain.
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Apr 16, 2012 00:46
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Chunk posted:Wow, whoever wrote that really hates poor people. One thing that causes me equal amounts of frustration and laughter is how conservatives think things like that are the height of humor and intelligence, but then the wonder why poor people tend to vote for more liberal and/or Democratic politicians. And it's not even that it's just about poor people, conservatives spend the majority of each year stripping away the rights and protections for women, gays, blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and pretty much any group that isn't rich, white, Christian, male, heterosexuals, but then they lament how most people from those other groups won't vote for conservatives. "poo poo, why won't any of these Latinos vote for us after we spent the year demonizing all Latinos and enacting legislation to racially profile all of them as illegal immigrants?" It's kind of like the schoolyard bully being confused about why he doesn't have any friends after he's spent the day tormenting everyone else. myron cope posted:I just don't get the "ACORN" obsession. Surely there's a better target. I didn't get it then and I surely don't now (although with the nature of internet forwards I'm assuming this one was created when ACORN was still a thing. Before they killed it. And refuse to just leave it dead.) It seems to be that the obsession stems from ACORN helping poor people and minorities, both of which are on the conservative "poo poo list." Think about it this way, if you felt there was a group(s) of people who were, by and large, shiftless, lazy, stupid freeloaders, would you really want an organization to help those people exercise their right to vote? Or hell, if you simply thought that the organization was registering people mostly for the opposing political party, wouldn't you oppose them? The entirely untrue bullshit about election fraud from ACORN just serves as the perfect support for their confirmation bias against the organization even though they opposed ACORN well before James O'Keefe made his fallacious videos. King Dopplepopolos posted:They hated it when Bush did it too. Every last one of them. Of course, they're lying, but that's what they'll say if you ask this, because in their mind admitting you're wrong means you're no longer the alpha dog. Exactly. The best part is when you pull a Daily Show-style clip juxtaposition showing conservative pundits defending Bush for something identical to what Obama is doing or, even better, a congressional voting record for conservative politicians. E.g. Paul Ryan. If deficit spending is so terrible and the National Debt is so "immoral" to leave to future generations, then why did he vote for tax cuts while at the same time voting for two wars and a completely unfunded Medicare Part D expansion?
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Apr 17, 2012 14:52
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Cowslips Warren posted:From my mom's coworker: A few things: 1. I just want to punch these people in their loving faces when they label themselves as "pro-family" to not subtly insinuate that LGBTQ people and their supporters are "anti-family." 2. quote:Their ultimate dream is to create a new America based on sexual promiscuity in which the values you and I cherish are long forgotten. 3. quote:*** Require schools to teach appalling homosexual acts so "homosexual students" don't feel "singled out" during already explicit sex-ed classes 4. quote:*** Spin impressionable students in a whirlwind of sexual confusion and misinformation, even peer pressure to "experiment" with the homosexual "lifestyle;" 5. quote:*** Exempt homosexual students from punishment for propositioning, harassing, or even sexually assaulting their classmates, as part of their specially-protected right to "freedom of self-expression;" 6. quote:The Homosexual Classrooms Act will turn America's schools into indoctrination centers and its classrooms into social laboratories -- and they're pulling out all the stops to pass it. 7. quote:Word problems in math classes are now to include homosexual characters. History classes will document the "civil rights" struggle against the "oppressive" pro-family establishment. 8. quote:In California, lawmakers want to "require schools to portray lesbians, homosexuals, transsexuals ... as positive role models to children in all public schools."
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Apr 18, 2012 01:20
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Loving Life Partner posted:Whenever I see stupid images shared and reposted to my feed, I report them, and if its from a personal facebook, it gives you an option like "Send a message to Joe Idiot saying you don't like it" and it puts in this really snarky little message for you, the responses you get from this are fantastic. Could you post some those responses?
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Apr 19, 2012 01:17
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Ghost of Reagan Past posted:Telling people that gay people exist and that you shouldn't be assholes to them is exactly what they mean by "indoctrinating kids into the homosexual lifestyle" or however they want to phrase it. It's absurd, but this is what some people really believe. Exactly. Just look at how popular Rick Santorum was in the Republican primary. Santorum is a guy who wants to ban contraceptives and thinks Lawrence v. Texas should be overturned so states can go back to criminalizing sodomy (AKA criminalizing homosexuality). This isn't some fringe nutjob on Free Republic or Stormfront, this is a politician who handily beat Mitt Romney in several states.
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Apr 19, 2012 11:01
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Sarion posted:Responding to the earlier discussion: Thanks for the detailed info, I agree the response does seem overblown, or at least the examples being thrown around are not accurate. But yeah, terrible law all around. I think you'd need more emphasis about how it's investment debt and not consumptive debt, as it's pretty obvious that this is where conservatives go with the argument, evidenced by their use of "iPods" and "flat screen TVs" as analogues to US government expenditures. Government spending is not on material goods for pure consumption, but rather on goods that will generate more economic output than the money put in, even if it isn't a direct 1-to-1 influence (e.g. road and highway maintenance as opposed to directly funding a scientific research project). Just give out very tangible examples like the internet. Without the US government spending money to develop the ARPAnet (and other national governments funding key aspects of the internet's development) and later investing in the fledgling internet, there would be no Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, iTunes, and various other billion dollar businesses, not to mention the massive savings in business costs facilitated by the internet (e.g. electronic bill paying, electronic marketing, electronic purchasing/selling, information access, electronic stock trading, etc.). The US government taking on debt for deficit spending isn't like buying iPods, it's like parents taking out a second mortgage to send their kids to the best schools possible or buying equipment to start their own business, e.g. ovens for a bakery, computers for graphic design, tools for an auto-body shop, etc. But yeah, sure, the level of our debt is something to be concerned about and we need to do something, but it has to be done in a way that we don't cut our own throats. We need to keep spending in certain places to maintain the high standards of our nation and economy (anti-poverty programs, public health programs, scientific research, road and highway maintenance/construction, education programs, healthcare, etc.), while we cut unnecessary spending in other areas (e.g. Afghanistan and other war zones, oil and natural gas corporation subsidies, getting rid of unnecessary and wasteful defense spending like we did with the f-22, getting to some kind of universal healthcare program) and increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans until we at least get back to Clinton-era levels. nm posted:Yeah, I'd love to live in Norway. Judging by how the Catholic Church has decided to crack down on US nuns for not being anti-choice and anti-gay enough and by the response from the Diocese and the Catholic Church about his comments, I don't think the Church is going to do anything to him. quote:“Based upon the current government’s threatened infringement upon the Church’s religious exercise of its ministry, Bishop Jenky offered historical context and comparisons as a means to prevent a repetition of historical attacks upon the Catholic Church and other religions,” said Patricia Gibson, chancellor of the Peoria Diocese. So, Obama isn't Hitler in 1942, he's just Hitler in 1934.
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Apr 22, 2012 12:40
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Armyman25 posted:This would be the easiest thing. It'd royally gently caress the economy and make the dollar worthless, but the thought is hilarious. China absolutely does not want this to happen and it has nothing to do with wanting their investment back. The Chinese government knows that it basically has no economy if the US and other Western nations aren't consuming the things they produce, so if the US dollar were to nosedive, it would mean that Americans wouldn't be able to buy much from China. Furthermore, it would actually cause more international consumption of US goods, as they'd be comparatively cheaper to both how much US goods used to cost and likely to the goods produced by many other nations. This is why the Chinese have been pegging their currency to the US dollar (meaning that it increases in value as the dollar increases and lowers as the dollar lowers), artificially causing Chinese goods to always be cheaper and therefore more likely to be consumed, especially by Americans. What's interesting is that the Chinese government has realized how reliant they are on the US and have recently tried to shore up their domestic consumer base so that they will be more self-reliant. The problem with this plan is that their current model of state capitalism allows employers to terribly mistreat workers, which includes paying them a pittance, preventing them from actually being able to afford many of the goods that they themselves are producing. So, something will have to change, potentially some kind minimum wage law far higher than what the average Chinese worker currently earns, but this has the consequence of increasing costs and the rear end in a top hat owners of Chinese companies will probably just want to pass on the costs to customers, thereby hurting the whole premise of making the goods more affordable to the Chinese public and international consumers. Mo_Steel posted:I love every terrible insignificant thing ever brought up against anyone in elected official, but particularly this one, because it let's me link to one of my favorite Daily Show clips about how not an issue this is: But the paradox is that the things for which liberals criticize Obama are things that Republicans actually support (e.g. expanding the war in Afghanistan, increasing drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen, pushing for extensions of the Patriot Act, not closing Gitmo, targeted killings like that against Anwar Al-Awlaki, continuing Drug War prosecutions and raids despite Obama's claims that he wants to treat drug use as a public health issue instead of a criminal justice issue, etc.), so it's not surprising that conservatives don't adopt these criticisms of Obama, instead opting to criticize him for good things (at least to liberals) he does (healthcare reform, the contraceptive mandate, ending Don't Ask Don't Tell, refusing to defend DOMA in federal court, moratorium on offshore drilling after the BP spill, halting the Keystone XL pipeline, etc.) or batshit crazy, made-up bullshit (birtherism, death panels, bowing to foreign dignitaries, "apologizing for America," etc.).
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Apr 23, 2012 12:26
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Dradien posted:Except that during a time of rampant "Free Marketism", millions suffered at the expensive of a few to get really rich, during the industrial revolution. Shasta Orange Soda addressed this in a brief sardonic manner. Conservatives and libertarians (same thing?), confronted with the evidence you allude to, will basically pull a "no true Free Market" fallacy and say that the economy during that robber baron period wasn't actually a free market because some of those robber barons had friends in government who let them buy their way out of trouble or into monopoly. They'll claim that in a truly free market, what those robber barons did would be impossible because the only way robber barons, monopolies, duopolies, etc. can exist is with government, so all those things are actually failures of government, not free markets. This all pretty much ignores how the wealthy would have even more power without government or in a libertarian system with little government, as these kinds of people don't really have a realistic and nuanced understanding of government, economics, political science, power dynamics, and various other disciplines relevant on how the wealthy gently caress over everyone else when given half a chance and would have grossly disproportion power in all of those areas irrespective of how laissez faire the government is.
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Apr 24, 2012 10:54
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Arglebargle III posted:Even this is a bit of misunderstanding. When there's no government all that wealth that you putatively "have" is no longer yours unless you can physically protect it. The wealthy, especially the financial elite, would be shorn of that wealth instantly with no legal system to keep track of their claim and no enforcement structure to protect it. There's a reason that a total failure of government is called a "collapse." Up is down, black is white, everything people took for granted is no longer true and all the stupid ideas people have about how great life would be without government turn out wrong. That's not really true from a historical perspective, as the wealthy have the means to hire other people to protect their wealth, and they almost always do so if the government is insufficient. Hell, it's even the origin of the word "company," (from the old French "compaignie," meaning "body of soldiers") as the wealthy and landowners would hire mercenaries to fight for them, especially to protect their wealth from those who would take it and to suppress popular revolts. A great, relatively modern example of this is how 19th century land barons and other wealthy men in the Old West would hire groups of gunslinging mercenaries to exercise their will when they couldn't utilize what little government there was or when it was insufficient for their goals. And don't forget how other robber barons would hire violent mercs as strike breakers when their employees revolted against unfair treatment. The wealthy always have power, even with government, but at least there's still a chance that a representative government could give the rest of the people a chance at fighting back.
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Apr 24, 2012 11:29
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There's a this common thread in these conservative economic claims exhibited in both the "What is Liberalism?" and Walmart letters. They both cite anecdotes as being evidence that liberalism and anti-Walmart sentiment are wrong, as if those are somehow more valid than the statistical evidence supporting those positions. Honestly, these people are so intellectually dishonest that that think one guy liking his experience at Walmart is somehow more valid than say those thousands upon thousands of female Walmart employees who tried to sue for discrimination but were shut down by the Supreme Court. They think that their token stories on women and minorities be fabulously successful somehow override the statistical evidence of widespread pay and job discrimination across the country.
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Apr 25, 2012 01:28
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Sporadic posted:I got a big kick out of this In what kind of backwards, bizarro-world does having an scanner gun, being told daily sales numbers, and basically being given a sales quota for the next day somehow like "being an owner"? Those are all pretty typical things being expected of staff at modern American retail stores. None of them imply ownership or even anything above being a wage slave.
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Apr 25, 2012 02:59
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wormil posted:After pointing out several outright lies in the video, the retort was that the video was meant "tongue in cheek" and that I was "turning it around", whatever the gently caress that means. I replied that if that meant it shouldn't be taken seriously, I agreed, because it is utter nonsense. Wow, that's kinda crazy. I'm betting that this person was referring to bell curves in the terms of that lovely loving book "The Bell Curve." It's pretty popular among shitheels who are trying to justify lovely economic systems and treating minorities of every category like poo poo.
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Apr 25, 2012 10:18
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El Boot posted:Just saw this posted on Facebook: So, does whoever doctored that image have absolutely no shame, think they are justified because of how "terrible" and evil environmentalists are, or what? Z-Magic posted:If the applicant gives any other answer they shouldn't get the job as they are obviously dishonest. Yeah, I'm pretty sick of applying to jobs where the interviewer acts like I'm supposed to devote my life to their organization as if it were some kind of cult. I understand the need for enthusiasm and dedication in many jobs, especially those that are difficult and emotionally taxing (e.g. social workers, teachers, etc.), but it seems really odd that somehow workers are supposed to be these devotional zealots while the employers treat them like fungible chattel.
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Apr 26, 2012 10:03
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Dameius posted:Taking the chain e-mail into the classroom! Why is it that college conservatives and libertarians (same thing?) think stupid poo poo like this or "Affirmative Action Bakesales" are clever, intelligent, and insightful? It's like they see other people doing creative things as protests and activism, like the stage performances of the Prop. 8 trial transcripts, but they don't really get how this stuff works, kind of like the "conservative comedy" oxymoron.
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Apr 27, 2012 11:21
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Pththya-lyi posted:Earlier this week, I told my small-l-libertarian dad about some of the common conservative chain emails, e.g. "Welcome to the Republican Party," and some of the common rebuttals to them, e.g. "The little girl could arrange for the hobo to do her extra chores, charge $50, pay the hobo $10, and pocket the difference." That kind of sounds like me and my cousin. On the rare occasions that we see each other, everything is just fine and we're having a good time and then BAM! he somehow works something insane into the conversation, like when he was telling me about his trip to New Orleans and remarked, "It was great, Black folks there know there place, not like up here." Or how, when I asked what his favorite place was from his time in the Navy, he said, "Singapore was nice. It's very clean with almost no litter or graffiti because they have corporal punishment. We should do that here." It's very much as you describe, it's as if my cousin and I live in two separate worlds. In my world, society is being ruined by corporations and their political allies, and anyone who isn't white, male, Christian, heterosexual, cis-gender, etc. is constantly getting hosed over. In my cousin's world, it's the white, heterosexual, Christian males who are always getting the short end of the stick as Blacks, Mexicans, gays, feminists, Muslims, liberals, Obama, and everyone else who isn't like my cousin is destroying society and making his life harder. My family is so hosed up.
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Apr 28, 2012 12:34
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Perestroika posted:Highly flammable ones. Yeah, I was pretty bemused by that one. I thought to myself, "What does this person think the Occupy Movement is doing?" Spiritus Nox posted:Not a political email, but when I responded to a relative's facebook post about Obama eating dog before, things got sidetracked into whether or not Obama was a (dirty, evil, America-hating) Muslim. I promptly (and politely, I hope) presented the facts that the only evidence indicating Obama to be Muslim was the fact that his father was one, whereupon she declared she couldn't argue with me because I was tainted and brainwashed by the liberal media and how she couldn't believe her own relative was slamming her status. Obama's dad was raised as a Muslim. Obama makes it pretty clear in one of his autobiographies that his dad was not a practicing Muslim as an adult and was likely an atheist. Pfirti86 posted:I also refuse to talk about abortion over facebook, though if I'm in a bad mood I'll just inform the person that they reminded me to make a donation to Planned Parenthood, and I advise they donate likewise to an organization that supports their point of view. Boom, free market solution. That usually shuts people up. But that perpetuates the conservative lie that Planned Parenthood is just an abortion organization. Only about 3% of its spending goes towards abortions, the rest goes towards things like pap smears, STD tests, contraceptives, gynecological exams, and other health services. Right before the Susan G. Komen controversy, they were counting on the money from Komen to go towards buying portable mammography machines for their clinics so they wouldn't have to refer out patients for mammograms. darthbob88 posted:I think you mean "Kathy Nickolaus", "Kathy Nicklaus" gets fairly useless results. Still, point taken, conservatives commit election fraud as well. ACORN never committed voter fraud. They were legally required to submit any and all fully filled out voter registration forms to the secretaries of state. ACORN and other organizations are legally prohibited from culling voter registration forms, even those that are obviously false (e.g. the infamous "Mickey Mouse" and "Donald Duck" registrations), only the secretaries of state are allowed to that. These regulations actually stem from a conservative voter registration organization that was intentionally disposing of registrations for Democrats, minorities, and other people who wouldn't vote GOP. What actually happened in the ACORN case is that ACORN had quotas for voter registration canvassers and a few exceptionally lazy canvassers decided to fill out obviously fake registrations to meet their quota without doing the legwork, as they knew making them blatantly false would mean that the registrations would get thrown out after they were turned in, but they'd still get paid for them. babies havin rabies posted:I've quit completely. I pretend that Facebook is a bar. Even more-so, people will say poo poo on Facebook that they won't say to your face, even while drunk. It's worse than that, because some of my friends treat Facebook like Twitter and post the most inane bullshit that they would never say to anyone else in real life. "I just had the best salad I've ever made!" "'Like' this if you love kittens!"
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Apr 30, 2012 04:13
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Obvious troll, but I'll give it a very quick go:The Worst Muslim posted:Actually, a few of those points were spot on: Ha, you honestly think any hipsters wearing Ché t-shirts actually know anything about him other than he looked boss as gently caress? The Worst Muslim posted:-You think Andrew Breitbart deserved to die. (the rest is some false equivalency about child rapers but it's true that goons seem a bit disturbed when they begin stroking each other over the death of a man). It wasn't glee or happiness that he died, just relief that he'll no longer have a chance to ruin people's lives with his lies. It's catharsis from the stress he put on society with his abhorrent behavior, not some kind of macabre satisfaction that he died. I bet if you actually asked progressives, they'd have preferred that he just reformed himself and stopped hurting other people for political and personal gain than that he simply died. The Worst Muslim posted:- You thought “Piss Christ” was wonderful art and deserved taxpayer funding, but that any newspaper publishing the Danish cartoons should be punished for insulting Islam and inciting riots. (The way you guys treat Jesus Christ like some kind of topical humour disgusts me). Except "Piss Christ" isn't meant as blasphemy, it's meant as indictment of the cheapening of Christian beliefs and Christ Himself through the commodification and materialization of faith, e.g. through physical icons like the plastic crucifix Andres Serrano used. It's not an insult to Christ or Christianity, but actually an affirmation of Christ through criticizing those who have strayed from His message and great works in favor of shallow and insincere worship through icons (like a person who acts very unlike Christ but still considers themselves to be Christian because they wear a crucifix and pay lip service to His Gospel). But poo poo, who cares about what art actually "means" or what the artists "intended," let's just be reactionaries who can't take any perceived criticism, right? It's like Christian conservatives getting all pissy about that exhibit with video of ants crawling on Jesus as an allegory for the suffering of HIV/AIDS victims. Welp, it must be offensive and insulting because it's ants on Jesus!! It couldn't be that it's actually serving as a social critique of a mostly Christian society that generally turns a blind eye to the suffering of many of its people, especially if they are gay, in a very un-Christ manner. The Worst Muslim posted:- You’re sorry that Dick Chaney survived his heart transplant, but are too timid to say so. (lay off Dick Cheney) So, progressives are at fault for something terrible even the author admits they've never said, but somehow the author just knows what every progressive is thinking? Sorry, I forgot that being a conservative gifts you with telepathy. The Worst Muslim posted:- You are convinced that anyone who doesn't think like you about the world is evil, stupid or both. (absolutely nailed this one) But doesn't that conflict with the (completely untrue) conservative trope that progressives are moral relativists who don't think anything is immoral or evil because it's all relative to the particular culture and its moral system (this is actually normative relativism, not moral relativism)? The Worst Muslim posted:- You have not studied economics, political theory, foreign policy or history at all, but instantly know the right solution for any public policy question. Why study when you know all the answers? Again, this conflicts with another conservative trope, that liberals/progressives are a bunch of effete, elitist academics. Pretty classic example of Umberto Eco's thesis on fascists, who describe their enemies as simultaneously strong and weak, allowing them to provoke fear and hate but inspire the people that they can still overcome the enemy.
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Apr 30, 2012 09:15
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Mr Ice Cream Glove posted:Incoherent ramblings Jesus Christ, it's that FDR Fala poo poo all over again. These fuckers are just terrible assholes. Also, dogs are pretty popular among Muslims, even in Middle East theocracies like Saudi Arabia. Dogs are basically prohibited by law but there is a thriving black market for dogs. This book actually goes into the issue.
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May 1, 2012 02:28
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Cowslips Warren posted:Things that interfere with God's Plan includes condoms, a small latex thing that many kids in sex ed pop like balloons. If God gets pissy about simple latex loving up His Plan, I bet he gets loving livid at this whole 'don't do poo poo on this day or Else.' Yeah, which are you going to be more understanding about, when someone uses contraceptives to avoid contracting a potentially deadly disease/unwanted pregnancy OR when they are playing with semantics like a weasely lawyer to get around your direct orders?
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May 2, 2012 01:30
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Sarion posted:The disease/pregnancy were his will, too. So it seems like in both cases you're sort of giving god the finger. And that's why I could never be religious. God is supposed to be benevolent but he's giving people serious illnesses and denying them the use of technology we've developed to prevent and treat disease.
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May 2, 2012 02:58
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Small Frozen Thing posted:Be fair, Bruce. Touche, my friend. Touche.
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May 2, 2012 08:36
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JohnClark posted:There is no way the people writing that don't realize just how dishonest they're being. It's so full of weasel words and bullshit it's almost unbelievable that anyone could be taken in by it. They note that this coroner "may" have been involved with the Breitbart autopsy (meaning he almost certainly wasn't) and later give his actual title, forensic technician. The guy's not even the coroner, he just works in the morgue. They furthermore offer no reason as to why someone would rub out the coroner/forensic technician the day the report was released; wouldn't the idea be to have him killed before he could publish his findings? Anytime I see poo poo like this posted I feel like screaming, "WHY DO YOU PEOPLE FALL FOR SUCH OBVIOUS BULLSHIT!!!!". It's all about confirmation bias. These people already hate Obama for whatever reason, so they will believe anything and anyone who further supports this belief, while simultaneously disbelieving any and all evidence to the contrary. So, it doesn't matter how ludicrous and far-fetched it is to believe in some kind of massive conspiracy to kill Andrew Breitbart and some random forensic technician who may or may not have had anything to do with Breitbart's autopsy (the coroner's office said he wasn't involved, only physicians were, because it appeared that Breitbart died of natural causes), OR how much evidence there is to the contrary, all that that matters is that Breitbart hated Obama and non-conservatives like they do. It reminds me of an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit (I think it was an episode about conspiracy theories in general, or maybe the Roswell landings or cryptozoology), where they showed a clip of a gathering of conspiracy theorists at a small bar/night club. The conspiracy theorist at the microphone said, "You'll never convince me that I'm wrong or that these things didn't happen." Penn responded through a voice-over, "And that's what distinguishes us from them, we want to be convinced. If you bring us some evidence that supports your claim, we'll take a look at it, and if it's real and not flawed in any way, we'll be willing to accept that it's true. These people will never accept anything they don't already believe in, no matter how much evidence you show them."
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May 5, 2012 11:12
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nsaP posted:I think they did. It was actually going to be their final episode before the final season got cut short. They supposedly had planned from the first or second season to make the series finale about how the show was itself bullshit, but I guess they couldn't get Showtime to fund another episode. Personally, I'm kinds glad they ended the show because the episode about taxes was so loving terrible that it was like some bullshit from Free Republic or World Net Daily. It was just a bunch of anti-tax, conservative, think tank assholes like Grover Norquist, but absolutely no economists, academics, etc. advocating in favor of progressive income taxes. They only interviewed two pro-tax people, one was some douche who co-founded the Huffington Post and the other was literally just some woman they met on the street.
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May 6, 2012 00:56
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Mister Roboto posted:Wait, this is real? The Heartland Institute purchased billboard space to run these ads featuring famous criminals and terrorists who accept global warming, like Ted Kaczynski, Osama Bin Laden, and Charles Manson, to malign global warming science with guilt by association. They received a lot of backlash, causing them to cancel the billboards, but they are still indignant and keep trying to justify their actions as a necessary "emotional appeal." 30.5 Days posted:I liked the episode about how the ADA is bullshit. They have this honest hard-working guy in a wheelchair they repeatedly interview who just wants a chance to show the world he can do everything that abled folks can. And then halfway through the episode, oh yeah, he's from the same objectivist think tank everyone we interview in this episode is from. It's kind of puzzling/annoying to me how they can get things so right in episodes like the "Death Industry" one, where they correctly called out the businesses and corporations manipulating and leeching off of the grieving family and friends of the recently deceased, but then they go all corporatist and libertarian with the taxes, Walmart, endangered species, handicap parking, and environmentalism episodes. It's like they have selective blindness and can only see the greedy business interests involved in some issues, but not in others.
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May 6, 2012 11:51
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StealthArcher posted:Why uncle why. Wow. The best part is that Klavan will never realize how ironic it is that he's busy rewriting history while chastising "liberals" for doing the same. 1. Yeah, Kennedy ramped up the war in Vietnam, but that was based on the work already done by the Eisenhower Administration. The Kennedy Administration adopted many foreign policy plans of the previous administration, like the Bay of Pigs, as many of the same bureaucrats (especially those in the military and civilian intelligence agencies) who came up with these plans were still in power. LBJ ramped up the Vietnam War even further than JFK and there is pretty much no disputing his status as a "liberal" (e.g. the Great Society, pro-integration, etc.). So maybe, just maybe, ramping up the "fight against the communists" had less to do with actually being an anti-communist ideologue and more about enhancing American hegemony and influence abroad? Also, to describe Kennedy as a "Cold warrior" in general is pretty disingenuous. The Cuban Missile Crisis only came to a peaceable end because Kennedy explicitly disregarded the bellicose telegram he received from Khrushchev and instead acted upon the conflicting, more conciliatory, peaceful letter Khrushchev had sent. If Kennedy were really some die-hard Cold Warrior, he would have likely regarded the threat as real and acted upon it with military power, potentially turning the Cuban Missile Crisis into a hot nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis is also notable for how Kennedy intentionally fought against Groupthink in his cabinet, as the Bay of Pigs turned into a disaster because the more cautious, less aggressive voices had been silenced by Robert Kennedy and other hawks in the Kennedy Administration. Most importantly, regarding Oliver Stone's "JFK" as some kind of representation of all "liberals'" views of the Kennedy Administration is incredibly dishonest. "JFK" was one single movie and has been resoundingly derided as pure fiction since it was released. 2. Terri Schiavo, another huge whopper. In 1990, Terri Schiavo suffered incredible brain-damage when her brain was deprived of oxygen after cardiac arrest due to an undetermined cause(s). Her brain damage was so severe that her brain weighed half of what it should have in a woman of her age and build. Wikipedia posted:Microscopic examination revealed extensive damage to nearly all brain regions, including the cerebral cortex, the thalami, the basal ganglia, the hippocampus, the cerebellum, and the midbrain. The neuropathologic changes in her brain were precisely of the type seen in patients who enter a PVS following cardiac arrest. Throughout the cerebral cortex, the large pyramidal neurons that comprise some 70% of cortical cells – critical to the functioning of the cortex – were completely lost. The pattern of damage to the cortex, with injury tending to worsen from the front of the cortex to the back, is also typical. There was marked damage to important relay circuits deep in the brain (the thalami) – another common pathologic finding in cases of PVS. The damage was, in the words of Thogmartin, "irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons." This means that Terri Schiavo, the person, was dead for the 15 years in between her heart attack and when her case garnered national media attention in 2005. It just so happens that the brain damage didn't affect the more basic brain functions required to keep the rest of her body alive, like breathing, heart rate, etc., so her body kept living after Terri Schiavo herself had long since died. More importantly, Schiavo wasn't "judicially starved to death," her feeding tube was removed at the behest of her husband, Michael, who claimed that Terri had made her end-of-life decisions before her heart attack and decided that she'd never want to be artificially kept alive if she were brain-damaged and in a persistent vegetative state, as Schiavo was from 1990 to 2005. Michael was opposed by Terri's parents and siblings who claimed that Terri was conscious and capable of recovery, something completely refuted by actual science. Klavan also fails to include that Terri's parents had offered to completely assume all financial and legal responsibility for Terri's care, leaving Michael without any personal incentive to remove Terri's feeding tube other than to fulfill her end-of-life wishes. If all he cared about was not being burdened with Terri, why did he spend 7 years in court trying to get her feeding tube removed rather than just leaving Terri's parents in charge of any and all responsibilities? Furthermore, the reason Terri Schiavo was "starved to death" was actually because "Evangelical Christians," the people Klavan credits with trying to "save Schiavo's life," oppose all reasonable measures to allow for physician-assisted suicide and other methods for people to decide their own end-of-life care. Most importantly, it's pretty absurd for Klavan to cite a "Law & Order" episode as somehow being "liberals" rewriting reality with their "culture." "Law & Order" is an obviously fictional show that occasionally takes recent news stories as the inspiration for episodes and then adds to them to explore other issues, and the show even explicitly points this out with a disclaimer at the beginning. He's also blatantly ignoring that "Law & Order" doesn't really have a liberal or conservative bias. For every episode where an "Evangelical Christian" or conservative is a murderer, there's an episode where an animal rights activist kills a medical researcher to free chimpanzees infected with HIV. Or a original Black Panther and civil rights advocate is put on trial for killing a cop. Or when a doctor is put on trial for falsely declaring a woman brain dead so he can harvest her organ for personal gain. (I've seen every. loving. episode.) 3. Notice how Klavan never mentions all the terrible things perpetrated upon native populations by Europeans. It's nice that he mentions western civilization curing disease, but yet he doesn't mention how European colonists intentionally used biological warfare against American Indians by giving them smallpox-infected blankets. It's as if he's saying, "Well, the Indians had warfare and conflict, so it doesn't matter that they were victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide by Europeans and Americans." Yes, it's historically wrong to imply that indigenous American populations were a bunch of peace-loving hippies whose perfect societies were ruined by bloodthirsty Europeans, but it's far worse to use this as a justification to be an apologist for crimes perpetrated against these people for over five centuries. Klavan seems to be from the Ayn Rand school of history. Klavan also deceptively implies that European society was more peaceful than indigenous populations, which is total bullshit for anyone who knows anything about European history. poo poo, when Columbus was busy "discovering" the Americas and slaughtering indigenous peoples for gold, his Spanish bankrollers were perpetrating the Inquisition against innocent people with the full consent and permission of the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, he's also lying about native cultures being misogynist and harmful to women. Yes, many tribes had gender roles and norms like other societies around the world, but there were plenty of others like the Cherokee and Iroquois which were explicitly matrilineal and nearly full matriarchies where women owned most of the property and had great power and control. The Iroquois also had one of the oldest participatory democracies on Earth, while most of Europe of that period was run by monarchies. As for the films he references, he's intentionally lying about Avatar. The soldiers in that movie are not US soldiers, but rather mercenaries hired to protect they financial interests of a large corporation on Pandora. If anything, this is a criticism of private military corporations like Blackwater and Dyncorp who hire out their staffs of former-government soldiers to the highest bidder, generally to the detriment of the local populations of wherever the mercenaries are sent, including murder, rape, ethnic cleansing, and child sex trafficking. The funny thing is that many of these PMCs get most of their money from the US government and intentionally try to prevent legislation that would prohibit them from engaging in human trafficking and child sex slavery while being US contractors. TLDR: Klavan is a moron and liar and I enjoyed tearing apart his hacky writer rear end. Bruce Leroy fucked around with this message at 11:10 on May 8, 2012 |
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May 8, 2012 11:02
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