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Mercury_Storm posted:I agree with the person who said earlier that right wing media plays to the fears, prejudices and ignorance people already have to rake in the cash. After all, there wouldn't have been a market for this poo poo in the first place if boomers and their ilk weren't clamoring for it. FOX just gives a giant blow-horn to the stupidity that already exists in America, and its not likely that that mouthpiece is going to be taken away anytime soon seeing how far it has seeped into US politics. I disagree. There's a ton of evidence supporting the conclusion that peoples' opinions are influenced more by media than the other way around. While media does need to draw attention, networks are pretty free to choose what to broadcast and how to broadcast it. The influence is even greater due the internet/smart phones; because there's so much saturation, topics/ideas present in the media make up an even larger portion of what people discuss with one another, and such a large amount of media exposure makes topics and opinions that aren't commonly discussed appear even more obscure/radical. People can be influenced fairly easily. Most media in the US is privately owned by wealthy investors, and it isn't surprising that most content is generally favorable (or at least not unfavorable) towards this group.
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Oct 18, 2012 21:39
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edit: NPR actually bothers me more than explicitly right-wing media, because so many people who consider themselves left-leaning/"socially conscious" enjoy listening to it and it more or less reflects what your average educated professional believes. Right-wingers are generally a lost cause, but these are people who might be more receptive to left-wing, or at least "social democratic" ideas.Paul MaudDib posted:NPR is legitimately awful. I can't count the number of times that I've heard them frame an issue between center-right and hard-right positions, they're really big on presenting a facade of being balanced while pushing neoliberal or even neocon positions. Assuming they even bother with the balance, other times they'll just produce editorial pieces, sometimes ones that were quietly bought and paid for by a corporate sponsor. There's a running thing between my friend and I where we'll call/text each other every time we hear NPR do a shill piece on natural gas. It's just so laughably blatant. Every couple weeks they'll run some "natural gas is amazing and creating so many jobs and is friendly to the climate!" spot where they insert maybe one or two contrary lines for "balance." Needless to say, the natural gas industry group is a big NPR sponsor. NPR is still pretty decent for any news that isn't related to politics, economics/finance, or foreign policy (i.e. anything serious). joepinetree posted:Can we talk about NPR here? Marketplace is APM, not NPR. But yeah, it also has a bunch of really bad segments, though I actually find it better than NPR when it comes to issues related to finance and economics (not exactly a difficult feat). Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 19:07
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Bushiz posted:Spending effort on it will make you look like a tryhard who's mad at him. He's good at dealing with people who are mad at him, and he's very bad at dealing with people who are making fun of him. Related to this, I find that a bunch of internet conservatives will completely flip the gently caress out if they feel you're disrespecting them. For example, if you just reply to them with something like "lol look at this guy" or "cool story bro" (and then never reply to any of their replies) they will often freak out and start demanding you respond to them. Like, they will sometimes proceed to send you multiple messages because they can't deal with the idea of someone openly disrespecting them and not being able to somehow "win" against them.
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May 7, 2016 01:47
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Crunch Buttsteak posted:Hey man, it's an actual thing. I wrote a few papers on it in college. Blame academia before throwing lovely smug quotes around it. I think there's a difference between a sub-culture existing and being worthy of study and it actually being remotely influential. It's interesting to study niche groups, but that doesn't make them any less niche. I'm not saying that shipping-related fandoms don't necessarily have a significant impact on the popularity of these superhero movies, but "they exist and have a somewhat noticeable internet presence" is not exactly strong evidence of that being the case. Only a few thousand shippers online is enough to be noticeable on Twitter or Tumblr, while the number of people watching these movies is in the millions, most of whom aren't posting online about them.
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May 25, 2016 20:05
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seiferguy posted:Didn't the ACLU basically say that it's wrong to suppress hate speech (either with violence / authority), and the best way to fight it was to use free speech of your own to counter it? In general I find myself very skeptical of the rather extreme pro-free-speech sentiment that seems pervasive in the US. I feel like, as Americans, we're brought up with this idea that free speech is obviously inherently a good thing and that limiting it is a slippery slope to some 1984-esque dystopia, but I don't really buy that. Speech can cause very real harm, and I don't really see any practical difference between telling a rape victim she deserved it and slapping her in the face. I feel like our legal system should be fully capable of dealing with the context of individual instances of harmful speech and that punishing or banning certain things isn't going to magically lead to a world where people are hauled off to jail for an angry blog post. And even if it sometimes *did* lead to unjust punishments, isn't it still possible that the benefits of limiting such speech might outweigh the harms? Maybe they wouldn't, but I feel that it's wrong to treat "free speech absolutely must not be infringed upon" as some moral axiom. I think part of the problem is that a very large number of people (primarily white males) are in a position where there isn't any speech that can cause them harm, and they lack the empathy to really imagine what it feels like to be targeted by hateful speech. Since there are no insults that can have a great impact on them, they just imagine that it's the same for everyone else. From my own experience as an opiate addict (who has never stolen from or hurt anyone, aside from the emotional pain of my family not wanting to see me suffer), it is extremely painful to see how frequently people talk about how addicts are scum of the Earth, and I imagine it is even worse to have such words used against someone because of their sexual orientation or ethnicity. edit: I should mention that I'm not referring to citizens using violence against each other here. I can't really imagine a situation where allowing that is a good idea. I'm talking more about the government punishing certain types of speech (and maybe treating such speech as a mitigating factor if someone does use violence in response to it). Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 21:41
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Chilichimp posted:There is a shitload of hateful speech targeted at white men... and I guarantee that a lot of MRA's are dipshits who think that rhetoric is aimed at them personally. Like Sharkie said, such speech carries little weight since it lacks the impact of speech targeted at minorities. Like, black people can call white honkies, but there isn't the same history (or capability) of oppression and violence there to back that up. There are a number of factors the contribute to the "effectiveness" of hateful speech, including stuff like power and how accepted by the public those views are (with something like addiction the latter is the main reason it is hurtful). While I'm sure that there are some MRA types who are delusional enough to truly believe that they're being oppressed, the problem there is more the delusion than the speech itself.
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Jun 1, 2016 22:23
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Periodiko posted:This is not the time to be deciding that maybe the first amendment shouldn't be interpreted as broadly or strongly as it has. This is the time for the opposite. This is the time for re-affirming the values of a democratic, open society with an absolutist's zeal. I am resisting the urge to quote Chomsky, but this is hardly a regressive position. The entire purpose of constitutional limitations is to act as a bulwark to a "messed up" society. Of course we're not there, yet. That's the point. Maybe we should wait until the orange-haired brownshirt stops running for President before we start questioning the value of strong first amendment protections? The part that concerns me is that it's very easy to advocate for (relatively) unrestricted free speech when you're not part of a group that might be harmed by it. An obvious example of speech that causes very real, serious harm is widespread racist speech, which can really gently caress with a person who happens to belong to the targeted group. It just feels like a large reason this extremely pro-free-speech attitude exists is because, almost by definition, the mainstream wouldn't be affected by the most harmful types of speech. Like, if you're some wealthy white person you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from allowing unrestricted speech. That being said, I appreciate the argument that any sort of hate speech laws would be made by people from those same demographics. I think it depends upon the situation in this case; at least in America, it is definitely true that many of people who make laws have better views regarding issues like race and sexual orientation than a large portion of the public (not that this makes their views good by any means, but at least better than some random white southerner). I guess the part of the pro-free-speech argument that I just don't buy is the idea that some restriction on, say, bigoted speech is on the same slope as the sort of stuff we see in dystopian fiction. I feel like if we elect a government that decides to start outlawing speech critical of government policies that such a society's problems go beyond just the free speech restrictions themselves. I'm not even really advocating for any specific limitations on free speech; I just disagree with the gut reaction most people seem to have that free speech must never be restricted. Unrestricted free speech definitely causes harm, and I think it's a discussion worth having on a case by case basis as to whether the harm it causes is greater than the harm caused by a particular restriction.
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Jun 2, 2016 02:26
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Periodiko posted:No, I'm elaborating on a basic defense of free speech in the most mild anarchist-leftist tradition, and recognizing the legal mechanisms which reinforce it in the US: the 1st amendment of the constitution and it's broad interpretation. Free speech has historically been a vital tool for activism and leftist political organization, and the history of suppression of those movements in the US is a history of the suppression of free speech. Speech has also historically been a vital tool for oppressing minorities. Also, I don't really care about the constitution; I'm discussing things from the perspective of "is this a good idea that would have a net benefit to society." I'm not arguing that restrictions on free speech are necessarily a good idea. It's entirely possible that it really isn't ever helpful to do so. I just notice that there's a knee-jerk assumption that free speech is this wonderful thing that must be defended at all costs, when in reality it has its pros and cons just like anything else. If asked to give some examples of speech that should be restricted, I honestly can't think of any off the top of my head. I just think that it's a discussion worth having and shouldn't be shut-down by default. Keeshhound posted:If you seriously can't figure out how your ideological opponents could use restrictions on free speech you advocated for against you, you don't have the right disposition for politics. While this being a serious concern is a legitimate argument, our legal system is capable of judging things on a case by case basis and taking context into account. I don't think that banning neo-nazi speech necessarily means that all other forms of political speech are also vulnerable to being banned. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jun 2, 2016 |
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Jun 2, 2016 05:24
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Keeshhound posted:You don't even have to go that far; Germany still has neonazis, they just don't wear swastikas or do the salute. (Apparently many of them dress like hipsters.) While preventing people from expressing certain forms of racism certainly won't make them stop being racist, it will make life easier for the targets of their racism. I'd much rather live in a society where a bunch of people are closet racists than one where people are explicit and open about it. This isn't to say that hate speech laws are the solution, but "people will be racists regardless" isn't really an effective argument against preventing hate speech. Deified Data posted:Maybe it's my weird teenage years as a libertarian talking but frankly it disturbs me how quickly some on the left flock to authoritarianism when they think the balance of power has tipped in their favor and will never, ever tip back with disastrous consequences. Eh, I understand this argument but it's kind of like saying "we shouldn't give the government the ability to enforce laws because what if the government becomes bad?!" Basically, if tide changes to the point where non-hate-speech starts to be silenced, I feel like the problem goes far beyond just the laws themselves. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jun 2, 2016 |
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Jun 2, 2016 18:53
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Chantilly Say posted:But the idea of the State de-legitimizing these ideologies is a really intriguing one to me, because the mechanism by which the State is able to do that has to be dependent on people saying "it's illegal therefore it must be bad." I feel like in practice the only speech that would be restricted (and even then only in certain contexts), at least for the foreseeable future, is the sort of stuff that an overwhelming majority of the population agrees is bad. If you end up with a situation where the vast majority of the country is cool with banning, say, leftist speech, the problem goes far beyond just the hate speech laws themselves, and I don't think the first amendment would protect us from that. We've already seen that historically the government doesn't mind ignoring the first amendment when the attitudes of it and the rest of the country point in that direction (see stuff like "free speech zones" or needing a protest permit), so I don't think that merely allowing certainly noxious and harmful speech to be restricted would actually be the cause of any harm in and of itself. I also think there's some confusion related to this assumption that restricting speech = being punished for the stuff you write in blogs or say to your friends, when it's usually just referring to restricting the sort of stuff people can say in public or in the media. Now, whether such speech restriction would actually have a noticeable positive impact is another question entirely, but I am extremely doubtful that banning people from openly saying explicitly racist things in public spaces would somehow be a slippery slope to some authoritarian dystopia. edit: Keeshhound posted:which, by the way, already counts as disturbing the peace. The thing is, this is itself a restriction on free speech. It's a form of restriction society has decided is a good idea, but it is still a restriction. People aren't talking about entering some new completely uncharted area here; they're just talking about changing the sort of speech we restrict and the reasons we do so. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Jun 4, 2016 |
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Jun 4, 2016 02:35
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The interesting thing about all the people saying "but his future is now destroyed" about this Brock guy is that it is super obvious that the reason they feel that way is that they could easily see themselves being in the same situation. They don't say the same thing about murderers or burglars or whatever because they can't really put themselves in their shoes, but a rapist? Yeah, they can kinda see themselves possibly doing that.
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Jun 9, 2016 21:35
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Hahahaha near the end of that video one of the guys says "hey how about this, you tell your child 'you want your own sweater, you make it yourself and stay inside until you're done'" I think these people get some sort of downright sexual gratification from the idea of having authority over others.
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Jul 5, 2016 01:28
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Octatonic posted:I keep seeing this and keep wondering if this means that she has mutilated her daughter's genitals or something Cause like, look at the pretty detailed depiction of a perfectly normal vulva you have on the left? Internalized misogyny is hella awful. Ignoring the fact that that account is almost certainly a parody account, I think the implication is supposed to be that having sex a bunch somehow makes your outer labia longer. edit: sort of like the common myth that having sex a bunch makes the vagina "loose"
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Jul 7, 2016 02:30
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Polybius91 posted:I wish I could believe this was a parody, but I don't see anything that really distinguishes it from the usual alt-right garbage. The alt-right are slightly more subtle and usually pay lip service to not being racist or sexist. They say a bunch of bigoted stuff but don't explicitly say stuff like "black people are dumb and bad" or "homosexuality is filthy and evil." Mister Macys posted:"Racists and people claiming to be racist as a joke are not significantly different." I think the only difference is that that trolls misrepresent the extent to which they're racist/bigoted, if that makes sense. Like, a person who ironically posts a bunch of stuff racist towards black people is obviously at least racist in the sense that they don't care about the impact their words might have on any black people (or other minorities) that might happen to read them, but they probably don't actually believe stuff like "all black people are bad." So they're still racist, just not in the exact way their words might imply. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Jul 7, 2016 |
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Jul 7, 2016 08:26
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UFOTofuTacoCat posted:This is what gets me. It doesn't seem like that astute of an observation and I'm still surprised that folks are still so upset. I voted for the Bernie but I had only the tinniest sliver of hope that things would shake out in his favor. Nothing about this is surprising, but the DNC openly favoring a candidate is still obviously bad and wrong and there should be repercussions for it (though those repercussions shouldn't involve people letting Trump win this election). A lot of people seem to be confusing what the DNC did with literally tampering with voting results, though. By all appearances, DNC officials openly wanted Clinton to win and occasionally pressured the media to those ends, but that isn't the same thing as them directly influencing voting results. Definitely lovely, and I'm happy DWS resigned, but it's not on the same level as some giant criminal conspiracy and Clinton probably would have won regardless (since the DNC wasn't really the cause of the Clinton favoritism, which tended to exist among most prominent Democratic Party officials, donors, etc to begin with).
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Jul 25, 2016 20:49
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Bast Relief posted:Can someone explain to me why his doesn't bother me, as a person who voted for Bernie in the primaries and will vote Hillary in the general because it seems like the woman listened. There's nothing exceptionally bad about it. It's just that it would be ideal if the DNC were at least somewhat neutral regarding primary candidates (unless one was just objectively terrible or something). It's nothing new or remarkable and doesn't break any laws.
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Jul 25, 2016 22:48
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Mahoning posted:On the other hand, old people grew up in a society of blatant racism, not this dog whistle poo poo. So from their perspective I kind of get it. To them, racism is straight up lynching black people and calling them n-words. Anything short of that is just you being an oversensitive little baby. Even a lot of the baby boomer liberals I know are completely incapable of understanding that stuff like "imitating a stereotypical 'black' voice" (or any sort of joke based on offensive racial stereotypes) is super racist. If I had to point to a key point of contention, it would be that older people (and of course many younger people as well) seem to believe that racism requires that you believe literally everyone of a race is inherently inferior in some way. In other words, if you think some black people are good and "articulate", you can't be racist. RuanGacho posted:I feel like right wing media trying to tie the Democrats to the Klan when literally David Duke is running in your party is a touch disingenuous. In the comments section for that dumb Dinesh movie about Hillary, there were a bunch of people saying that the idea of voters switching from Democrat to Republican on issues like race and social conservatism is a myth. I don't understand how someone can deny that, when you can literally look up the electoral college result maps for every presidential election and see most Southern states change from blue to red. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 18:48
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I never knew it was pronounced "bright-bart" ...what? I can sort of understand someone thinking it's pronounced like "bratebart" or "breetbart" since "ei" is sometimes pronounced like "A" or "E", but it's hard to imagine a native English speaker pronouncing "Breit" as "bree-it".
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Aug 24, 2016 23:22
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Jerry Manderbilt posted:i find that the kind of people who get all smug about [insert group here] being oversensitive or thin-skinned tend to themselves be hilariously thin-skinned—and cripplingly self-unaware to boot Like most conservative views on their political opponents, the idea that liberals/leftists are oversensitive is just them projecting real hard. It's actually kinda of uncanny how just about every insult conservatives use against liberals applies to themselves. edit: Some day we will find out that Milo's mom is been held hostage for the past few years and that he has been threatened to continue expressing terrible alt-right political opinions or they'll kill his mom. His mom will be rescued and then someone will say "It's okay. You can finally rest now" to Milo and he will burst into tears. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Aug 25, 2016 |
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Aug 25, 2016 08:27
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Perestroika posted:At this point I'm becoming increasingly convinced that literally nobody who bitches about safe spaces even knows what the term means. They also probably have never experienced any real trauma to speak of and can't comprehend why being reminded of a traumatic experience would be deeply unpleasant.
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Aug 25, 2016 18:59
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Phone posted:They're also lying liars who lie. 31 million readers? 10% of the US population reads Brietbart? I wouldn't be surprised if that many people have technically read Breitbart at some point, though they obviously don't have that many "active" readers. It's not hard for someone to have been exposed to a couple random Breitbart articles or something.
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Aug 25, 2016 21:29
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Geostomp posted:Yes, but without quite enough zealotry or organization to convince them to blow themselves up for the cause. At least, not yet, but another eight years with a Democrat as president after seeing their lord and savior Trump fall might given them time to whip themselves into that big of a frenzy. I'm imagining some fat white guy with an anime t-shirt walking into the middle of a crowd and yelling "FOR THE LULZ" before blowing himself up. Crabtree posted:Even if this is a joke, it's hilarious how they both identify with the amoral arsonist that kills people with bombs in a mask for gay people and with the fascist white supremacist government that said terrorist is fighting against. Um, it's obviously making fun of alt-right people. It's not even imitating them, it's just saying "alt-right people believe all this dumb poo poo!"
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Aug 26, 2016 06:47
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FuzzySkinner posted:I tried listening to some alt right shitbags to kinda reinforce why I think these shitbags are horrible people. I see all these comments about how women are so degenerate and have so much sex these days, which is hilarious in light of that recent study revealing that millennials actually have less sex than previous generations did at their age. At least some racists and misogynists base their ideas off of misleading statistics; these guys just base them off of their fantasies of how slutty attractive women must be.
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Aug 26, 2016 17:20
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Shbobdb posted:Yeah, modern millennials love 2D and have their waifu as an avatar, right? Huh? If you're referring to my avatar, someone went and bought avatars with that character for like 500 people (or something similarly crazy) a couple months back. I didn't notice until someone mentioned it, since I've kept avatars disabled on the forums for the past 5+ years. This is what I was referring to: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-millennials-less-sex-20160802-snap-story.html The title is a little misleading (apparently the study found that the number of millenials not having sex is greater than previous generations, but this doesn't mean that everyone else is having less), but it definitely stands in contrast with the whole "women today are sluttier than they used to be" narrative (and that's of course ignoring the fact that they would consider that a bad thing in the first place).
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Aug 26, 2016 17:49
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I was reading the comments some friend of a Facebook friend made on some post of his regarding the whole Kaepernick thing (which was good, the Facebook friend in question has good political opinions), and it was funny watching her struggle to articulate why Kaepernick's actions made her so angry. She kept alternating between words/phrases like "disrespectful" and "uncalled for", but it was pretty obvious that in her heart she wanted to call him "uppity" and just couldn't find the words for it. The best (worst) part is when she said that it was disrespectful because he owed the country that freed his ancestors. I replied saying that it is laughably ridiculous to think black people should thank the country that enslaved them in the first place for freeing them, and she then said "but the people who enslaved him are no longer alive," to which I replied "...neither are the people who freed the slaves. Either you refer to the country as an entity or to specific groups of people, but you can't arbitrarily switch between the two" (because apparently she was incapable of realizing that she directly contradicted herself in the space of two comments). While I think that a white football player would have also experienced a backlash for doing the same thing as Kaepernick, there's something clearly different about the sort of backlash black people get. I think the difference is that, ironically, there's this greater element of "you should be thankful" when black people condemn the country.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:26
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BROCK LESBIAN posted:This literally happened at the Olympics and the white guy was "moved to tears so he didn't cover his heart" and the black woman was "being disrespectful". True, though I think it's harder to come up with an excuse for someone sitting down while other people stand for the anthem (that's what happened, right?). I'm sure they would come up with an excuse for a white athlete people like if possible, but there isn't much of a way to interpret this other than someone criticizing America. He also explicitly confirmed the meaning of his actions.
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Aug 31, 2016 00:09
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Doctor Butts posted:Typical NFL'er makes upwards of the minimum of 450/yr. Minimum for 1st and 2nd year after that is 525k/600k respectively. Typical NFL'er lasts 3 years in the league. Assuming they don't get significant raises from the rookie salary, that's 1,575,000 at the end of their career. You're ignoring the time value of money. Assuming an interest rate of 5% (which I think is pretty low) and using your numbers, the future values are more like 9-10 million for the football player and 6-7 million for the "typical American family." edit: Not that I think it matters at all, I don't really have a problem with what professional athletes are paid
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Aug 31, 2016 18:19
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Dirk the Average posted:This. Hell, even something as simple as your parents having connections at a large company and getting you great internships and a good job out of college is a huge leg up. Networking is extraordinarily important, and there's no good way to equalize that. Hell, just look at Theranos for a great example. This really rich Russian guy I was friends with in college one time mentioned how he got some summer internship/job at a hedge fund through his parents' contacts after freshman (or sophomore, forget) year, but insisted that it definitely had nothing to do with him getting a really good internship with JPMorgan/Chase for the summer after junior year and that he got that internship due to being totally awesome and unique during the interview. Like, he honestly seemed to believe that the previous job was unrelated. Speaking of which, probably the biggest advantage the wealthy have is that they're able to more or less start the "internship chain reaction" by getting their child an internship earlier than it would normally be possible to, effectively giving them a better resume than nearly all their peers when it comes time to apply to the important junior year internship. edit: Honestly, I'm not much of an exception; I got a job at an insurance company after sophomore year through a friend (who previously held the same job) recommending me. Then the following summer I was recommended for an internship at this MIT research laboratory (not on campus but affiliated with them) by my uncle who worked in a different department there. So part of my opinion on this is based off my personal experiences. I would probably be working retail now if not for being fortunate enough to have these connections. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Sep 1, 2016 |
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Sep 1, 2016 07:08
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Dirk the Average posted:To be fair, it is a mix of both. Unless your parents are incredibly influential, rich, or own the company, you're not sticking around in a high end company as an underperforming intern/employee. It's just that the connections give you inroads that few other people, even your peers who are nominally more qualified, have open to them. Yeah; obviously if you literally can't do the job you're (probably) not going to be okay even if you have connections. But connections make things drastically easier and greatly reduce/remove the challenge of getting hired in the first place, which is the most luck-dependent aspect of finding a good job. Also, another benefit to coming from a wealthy background is that it is far more likely that you will be provided with experiences as a child/teen that genuinely make you a more desirable employee once you get to college. So even if you couldn't get a internship/job through nepotism, you're more likely to have a great education (which probably includes a bunch of stuff in addition to school itself, like summer programs) as well as the advice of your successful family. Honestly, I might go as far as valuing the last part (advice from family) more than anything else. Even if you work really hard, if you come from a poor/uneducated family you might not have anyone to turn to when trying to make decisions related to your academic or professional careers. My parents knew jack poo poo about the general path towards getting into a competitive university or job, and I was just lucky enough to go to a high school with other kids who did know about this stuff and copied them. If you're unfortunate enough to go to a high school where everyone else is poor, you might not have many places to turn to for advice if you wanted to become academically/professionally successful.
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Sep 1, 2016 18:01
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BarbarianElephant posted:The fact that you *do* have to do the work and be talented, however rich your family, is why people from privileged backgrounds often don't realize the role their family had in giving them a headstart. Because they *did* work hard, often very hard. So they assume that's all it takes, and anyone could do it if they set their minds to it. Yeah, most of the rich people I knew in college who ended up with great jobs definitely worked hard, but what I don't think they realize is that other people work just as hard, if not harder (but without the perk of making a ton of money as a result). It's also a lot easier to make yourself work hard if you have a high quality of life to balance it with and don't have to worry about a bunch of the stuff poor people do (like financial stress, etc).
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Sep 1, 2016 21:40
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joepinetree posted:Chait even had the gall to say on NPR that this was all symptomatic of a new attitude on left to shut down speech, which he said, unchallenged, shortly before a segment on Kaepernick. I also saw a spot on NPR about this, and it was dumb as hell (just like most NPR reporting on political issues). They basically let a couple people who liked U of Chicago's statement speak (one was some dumb high schooler who was just like "yeah, uh, I think freedom of speech is good!") and then let some other person who didn't like it speak and just left it at that, like both the opinions were inherently of equal value.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:32
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WampaLord posted:Oh, hey, we actually have a way of measuring this, it's called the underemployment rate, and it's dropped a lot recently, so maybe all of your anecdotal personal experience isn't representative of the entire country? That's kind of a misleading graph; it only shows a time period of one year and sets the y axis range to the min and max rates over that short time period so it looks like this dramatic decrease. I mean, it's true underemployment has dropped, but that graph makes it look far more extreme than it actually is (and the fact that it only started dropping 5 months before the end of the graph makes it kind of questionable to rely on for determining long-term trends). It's also important to take into account stuff like personal debt and job benefits when looking at the average person's real financial situation (though I think that at least the former has decreased?). I don't doubt that there's been some level of economic recovery, but the biggest misunderstanding seems to be that a change from "super lovely" to "really lovely" means that the economy is still poo poo, and there is no logical reason to think that this economic recovery will just continue until the economy (as far as it affects the average person) could actually be considered "good."
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Sep 3, 2016 09:00
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Keeshhound posted:Literally every atrocity committed in all of history has begun with "Well, it's not as if they're really people." If you can't justify your position with anything better than that, you need to give it more thought. The obvious difference here is that Nazis are a group of people literally defined by "being bad people who want to hurt others." It is not even remotely comparable with disliking some minority group or something. What are you even worried about? Like, what exactly is the terrible path you are afraid we'll go down? How in the world does some people punching Nazis lead to...whatever terrible thing you think it would lead to? Think of it this way - if we reach some point where the tides turn and punching minorities (or whoever) in the face has been accepted*, our society is already completely hosed and that has nothing to do with the fact that we once were okay with punching Nazis. If such a big political shift occurs that violence against non-evil groups has become normalized (more than it already is, at least), it will mean we have much bigger problems that exist independent of whatever Nazi punching may have occurred in the past. Like, I sort of see where you're coming from, but if you really boil it down your argument doesn't make any sense and stems from a more broadly held dogmatic belief in absolute free speech that exists in America. Also, since I'm not clear, are you morally against punching Nazis, or against making it legal to punch Nazis? I would agree that we shouldn't make it legal to punch people, but I would also look the other way if I saw someone punching a Nazi because there's literally nothing wrong with the act itself. Legally it just becomes difficult to define where to draw the line, but on an individual basis it's obvious if someone is a Nazi. *This brings up another element of this whole debate - violence against minority groups already frequently occurs without any sort of punishment or retaliation. It's not like this is some hypothetical that might occur if we accept that it's okay to punch Nazis.
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Jan 25, 2017 03:22
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Groovelord Neato posted:the gently caress happened to these people. It's weird. I remember my "Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers" club in college (2004-2008) being a majority women (with like a third of the club being LGBT) club that invited Marxist professors to discussions, and next thing I know all the atheist organizations are bunch of bigoted libertarians or something.
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Aug 16, 2018 06:16
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Screaming Idiot posted:Knowledge is important, and while the media is absofuckinglutely not perfect, it's still doing a lot to keep the treasonous parasites in charge in check. Journalists right now are being assaulted because they have the audacity to report the news, by Right-Wing propaganda, the pretend-dictator and his evil crony friends, and by know-nothing luddites on both sides of the spectrum because how dare they not be Fox News/completely perfect! While I'm not remotely convinced that there's a reasonable path to the outcome OwlFancier is describing (I feel like any path to that outcome might cause more harm than good), he is absolutely correct that the net outcome of media is to preserve the wealth/power of those who currently hold it. While there are disagreements among the rich, one thing they agree on is that they should stay rich, and the media serves to lock out any opinions that could threaten that status quo (through defining the range of "acceptable" opinions, which basically correspond to the spectrum of mainstream liberal to conservative ideology). edit: At the very least, the idea that it's holding Trump and the like accountable is laughable on its face. The media absolutely is more helpful to Trump than it is hurtful. Screaming Idiot posted:You think it's bad now? Imagine how loving bad it would be if nobody was reporting what he was doing. Imagine how much freedom he would have if the average Joe didn't know what vile poo poo he was up to. Honest question - what has the media stopped Trump from doing? I can't think of a single thing. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 06:23
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Slutitution posted:Well, I find it amusing how the wealth gap in America is discussed more on RT America than all of the American cable media outlets combined. They also regularly have 20-30 minute interviews (oh my god, an actual analysis?!) with guests instead of the 3-5 minute segments CNN and Fox have multiple times an hour where they mostly discuss media horserace bullshit like Stormy Daniels and Trump's tweets. That isn't because it's state media, but because it's state media of a state opposed to the US, and highlighting problems of the US just happens to be simultaneously a good thing and something that Russia considers to be in its interests. Put another way, there's no reason to think that US state media would focus on the same stuff. It's hard to really come up with a type of news media that would avoid the issues present in existing corporate or state media. I guess you could, at the very least, make news media non-profit and worker-owned (so it can't be owned and influenced by private investors), but you'd still end up with the problem of media being beholden to those who fund it, whether it's private entities or the government.
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Aug 16, 2018 21:22
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Groovelord Neato posted:yeah people hear they're gonna pay 5k extra in taxes and not realize they're now not having like 10k going towards their private plan anymore. i had to explain it to my coworkers at lunch one day. This is why the anti-MfA liberals who like to bring up "but when polls bring up costs a majority don't support it!" are full of poo poo. An more-accurate poll would instead include information that, for the vast majority of respondees, their net costs would go down. The problem is that many people, when they see "funded by taxes," won't put two and two together and realize that those taxes would both be in place of current insurance costs and be less. That whole situation has always been a perfect example of what can go wrong when liberals "value data/objective facts" but aren't actually smart enough to interpret them. Slutitution posted:I think this qualifies as well considering Twitter refuses to get rid of alt-right figures and nutjobs like Alex Jones off their platform, but will then immediately ban any leftist for telling the truth, like this: The irony of suspending someone's account for "trying to silence someone else's voice" is pretty hilarious, especially given nothing about the original tweet could possibly have that effect. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Aug 18, 2018 |
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Aug 18, 2018 17:45
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OneEightHundred posted:He's partly right though. The "dominant" bit is ridiculous, but that whole "atheist movement" thing of the late 2000's had a ton of white dudes trying to gerrymander themselves into oppressed person status. There actually is/was non-trivial discrimination against atheists, but it's sorta like antisemitism in that it's the sort of thing that is largely invisible if you live in certain (usually more urban/diverse) parts of the US. But it's definitely an issue if you live in certain religious/conservative areas.
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Aug 19, 2018 19:18
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side_burned posted:What the gently caress is Wonkette? I have a friend who brings them up a lot in conversation and I have never looked at it until we where swapping articles this morning and I got to say the merchandise section is the most cursed thing I have ever scene. Basically what Grando said (except for one thing I mention below) - it's a genuinely fascinating portal back to Bush-era liberal internet. I AM GRANDO posted:It’s a Bush II-era politics website frozen in time, like if the West Wing were in its 24th season and referencing covid and trump. It’s like a liberal version of freep, or the simpsons. Mostly true, except I disagree with the West Wing comparison. Wonkette's sorta thing is "irreverent" liberal humor that uses casual speech and even (gasp!) cursing. The ideology is basically like you describe, but the "culture" is a specific sort of gen X/boomer liberal.
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Dec 11, 2022 02:42
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