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To be fair though, they're right at least in part. A couple pages back Fishmech was blabbing about how in other countries self-defense was not considered a legitimate reason to purchase a firearm and how that should come to pass here as well. The problem with that is that the "wild west gun culture" hasn't just wormed its way into the American psyche, it's also embedded in our legal interpretations. A series of court cases have established that the police do not have a duty to protect you even against eminently forseeable threats or even to respond and you have absolutely no legal recourse. The second amendment is one of the few constitutionally guaranteed methods of protection and if it is removed then something needs to replace it. It's perfectly fine to acknowledge that we're living in a crazy wild-west world but for that to end there needs to be a sheriff in the town, we can't just replace it with wishing. Rich people, of course, can afford to hire bodyguards or private security contractors or whatever mercenaries are calling themselves nowadays. They will never really be impacted, just like how rich and connected people can still get concealed carry permits even in gun-free New York City. Poor people are the ones who will lose their protection, and they're also the ones the cops will be ignoring in the first place. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 20:31 on May 19, 2014 |
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May 19, 2014 20:02
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Fried Chicken posted:If you think the point of drone strikes is to instill terror in the surrounding populace instead of kill and destroy a specific target, you are way off in your own bubble and need to reconnect with how people really think. Yes, this is absolutely a goal of the drone strike campaign. To quote the White House Press Secretary on al-Alawki's son: quote:GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business. Seriously the man straight up said "if you're irresponsible enough to become a terrorist it's OK to murder your family". Drone strikes are openly a sword of damocles hanging over your families' heads. It may not be something that's quite made it into the State of the Union speeches yet but crowing about it at White House pressers isn't exactly being coy about it. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 20:17 on May 19, 2014 |
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May 19, 2014 20:08
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Fried Chicken posted:So a quote about "you shouldn't drag your children into your paramilitary to continue your war" is now "we want to scare the living poo poo out of everyone else there so they don't dare raise a hand against us"? Al-Alawki's son hadn't heard from his father in two years, and at this point he'd been dead for several weeks/months so I'm curious how you're getting the idea that he was "dragging his son into the paramilitary to continue his war". quote:We don't want them terrified of us. That is a bad thing. We want them to like us, to have a pro USA political bloc, to cheer us on. Having them terrified is actively sabotaging having that. This is a point that was hammered home constantly - that we were the "tip of the spear" striking military targets, but we had to be careful because we wanted to win hearts and minds. The assholes who scared them were the problem, in other branches the term was "strategic private", the low level dumb poo poo who would do something horrible and mass media meant the scary image was all over the place. The US would never do a thing that is counterproductive to its interests!  Seriously, do you really think it's impossible that the US would be pursuing a carrot and stick approach? Try to win the hearts and minds of the population while making it clear that associating with terrorism in any form is going to be really unpleasant not just for you but for people you love as well? People pursue ends that seemingly come into conflict all the time, we even have cute terms like "carrot and stick" for them. That includes this war, where we've done numerous things that oppose wining hearts and minds. Right off the top of my head, there's the time some tank truck convoy got hit and then we bombed the civvies who came out to try and steal a can of gas to cook their dinner, or the endless night raids. Did that all just not happen because it might hurt ~*hearts and minds*~? Or maybe the situation isn't quite as shallow as you pretend it is, and the US government is a big system that is pursuing lots of ends in ways that are not always complimentary? quote:Get out of your bubbles, you sound like left wing Cliven Bundys, spouting conspiracy theories and your own special "read between the lines" like you get at WND The reading I made of that is perfectly fair. A more valid criticism is that Gibbs is just a press secretary, not a policy decisionmaker, and maybe he just said a dumb thing because he was having a bad day. That said, it very much seems like one of those "unforced errors" in which a politician accidentally says what he's really thinking. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 21:00 on May 19, 2014 |
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May 19, 2014 20:49
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GreyjoyBastard posted:So it's your position that the terror component is an intended outcome and not a lovely side effect we should try to mitigate? Certain characteristics are certainly tending that way. For example, "double tap" strikes (hitting a target, waiting for rescuers to arrive, then hitting the rescuers) was once considered a hallmark of terrorist activity. quote:"'The problem is that once the initial explosion goes off, many people will believe that's it, and will respond accordingly,' [the Heritage Foundation's Jack] Spencer said … The goal is to 'incite more terror. If there's an initial explosion and a second explosion, then we're thinking about a third explosion,' Spencer said." This has become a pretty standard tactic used in the prosecution of the War On Terror, both in human-involved situations like the Collateral Murder video as well as drone strikes and such. quote:The frequency with which the US uses this tactic is reflected by this December 2011 report from ABC News on the drone killing of 16-year-old Tariq Khan and his 12-year-old cousin Waheed, just days after the older boy attended a meeting to protest US drones: The President isn't going to come out cradling a white cat and twirling a moustache and announce that he's going to blow up the moon if there's one more terrorist attack, but the tactics we employ, the standards we use to employ them, etc are all pointing in the direction of a "terror" component to the campaign, which the administration probably perceives along the lines of "incentive not to become involved in terrorist activity". And when people like Gibbs come out and say things like that, well... The idea that the US only attempts to "win hearts and minds" and does not attempt to provide harsh incentives for people to stay the gently caress away from anything potentially definable as terrorism is really the oddball one here. We don't even like people showing up to aid wounded terrorists. If you're willing to attack good-Samaritan first responders why is an implied threat against your family (should you become a terrorist) such a big leap? Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 21:50 on May 19, 2014 |
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May 19, 2014 21:11
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Boon posted:That's why I say you're being dishonest. It's not "Lol we'll just hit everything" It's "Well gently caress, if we try to hit these targets efficiently we'll lose our bomber crews - go higher, drop more" Actually there was a rather prominent contemporary debate over this exact issue. The British had very recent memories of the Blitz and their opinion on the topic of bombing civilians was somewhere between "who gives a gently caress" and "blow the fuckers to hell". quote:"The destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized community life throughout Germany [is the goal]. ... It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives; the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale; and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories." -- "Air Marshal Arthur Harris to Sir Arthur Street, Under Secretary of State, Air Ministry, October 25, 1943" quoted in Tami Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 220. quote:Concerning the renewal of area bombing, the Directorate of Bomber Operations focused specifically on creating civilian casualties, which was an extremely candid reversal of the earlier focus on destroying structures and housing: "If we assume that the daytime population of the area attacked is 300,000, we may expect 220,000 casualties. 50 per cent of these or 110,000 may expect to be killed. It is suggested that such an attack resulting in so many deaths, the great proportion of which will be key personnel, cannot help but have a shattering effect on political and civilian morale all over Germany." The US at least focused more on trying to attack specific targets, but after the precision-bombing raids on Schweinfurt went really poorly we said "gently caress it" and started supporting area bombing too. quote:Within weeks after the Schweinfurt raid, opinion within the Eighth Air Force had shifted in favor of adding nighttime area bombing to the American air offensive. General Ira Eaker, until this point a stout defender of the policy of targeted bombing wrote to Hap Arnold "I am concerned that you will not appreciate the tremendous damage that is being done to the German morale by these attacks through the overcast, since we cannot show you appreciable damage by photographs. … The German people cannot take that kind of terror much longer."[9] After the US got into it there was Dresden, which saw the US deliberately attempting to burn the entire city down and kill the entire population with various tactics. First they did a big airraid, then they allowed a period of time for civilians to reemerge from shelters, then they did a second bombing raid using incendiaries. This was calculated to be much more deadly than either type of ordnance alone, since the fire would spread very quickly due to the damage from the first raid. quote:The Allied commanders studied aerial photographs of German cities and specifically targeted areas of heavy residential populations. His aim, said Harris, was to make the ‘rubble bounce’ not just in Dresden but in every German city. The firebombing campaign in Japan was pretty ugly too. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 05:53 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 19, 2014 23:55
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Fried Chicken posted:How about we use the facts instead. Show me evidence of a torture program since we shifted away from Bush Cheney. And no, feeding people on hunger strikes doesn't count. quote:Labeled Appendix M, and propounding an additional, special "technique" called "Separation", human rights and legal group have recognized that Appendix M includes numerous abusive techniques, including use of solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation. We eliminated a few specific torture techniques, not the use of torture. We're particularly big on psychological torture because it can be dismissed as "not real". Stuff like sensory deprivation can literally drive you insane and is absolutely torture just as much as the water cure. Obama is a-OK with sensory deprivation for indefinite periods of time. Sleep deprivation can also be used indefinitely or supplemented with additional stressors like continuous exposure to strobe lights and loud music. That's not even getting into the less-abusive things like sexual assault or physical abuse like stress positions. Physical torture is also still taking place via renditions. It's probably a bit less, but it's still going on. Not even PolitiFact can bring themselves to make this a Promise Kept! I really don't know why you would lean on prisoner treatment in the War On Terror as an example of how ethically we've conducted ourselves in recent history. Bush wasn't that long ago and even Obama hasn't exactly been a shining light on a hill. The guy also gave you some specific examples, like the torture that Petraeus was involved in. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 01:10 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 00:22
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computer parts posted:To get the most out of it you just make the districts absurdly small - 40,000 people per rep or so. You can't gerrymander easily at that high of a resolution. Yeah, this is really one of the things that fundamentally broke our political system when we scaled it up. As originally conceived, representatives each had about 30-40k constituents and the system works OK at that level of granularity. Having that many reps would be a challenge in some respects, but would be advantageous in other ways. Constituent service would probably be easier for one.
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May 20, 2014 19:25
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loquacius posted:On the other hand, with America's current population that'd give us a Congress with like 10,000 people in it. Which sounds horrible. Junior legislators already wield very little power, most of the actual work is done at a party level or by a relative handful of powerful committee members anyway (essentially the same as the former). Sure, they can introduce bills if they want, but the first step is to bounce it to one of those committees and if it makes it out of committee it's at the mercy of the Speaker or the Senate Majority Leader to schedule a vote. We're already living in that particular dystopia.
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May 20, 2014 19:29
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Stultus Maximus posted:No, it could get much worse. That's a fundamentally different political system with a bunch of things different from the Federal system. For example, seats are elected at-large rather than first-past-the-post, so not even the basic setup is really comparable. If anything that's a window on what the US would look like if every state had 11 Senators, not more representatives. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 19:35 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 19:33
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It's much easier to take control over half of a few hundred people than a few thousand. The other major snag we're running into is that the government we're using now is based on one made by people that likely didn't bother to think about a planet with a population number in the billions. The population of the U.S. was less than 1% of what it is now in 1776. You can't just magically scale a government up like that and expect it to work. As the number of people represented by each representative gets larger and larger you have an increasingly separate class just by virtue of how numbers work. At this point the political class is basically completely separate from the rest of society. Conversely though taking over one representative is a lot less meaningful when you have 7,850 of them instead of 435 (which would be the Originalist-sized House for current population). You'd have a power bloc that is roughly as influential as PETA, so what? In that situation we're already talking about a lot of majority-minority (racial and political), that's pretty much a feature not a bug. At the core this argument boils down to "representing the will of specific groups of people is bad because it's easy to influence people" and that's a sentiment that is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. I'm sure something similar was said about the Civil Rights Act, just with black pastors as the villain instead of megacorps. The problem of money influencing politics is fundamentally separate and can be attacked without gutting representative democracy. Another reasonable complaint is that it would lead to increased polarization. Yeah, it might destroy the consensus between the neoliberals and the far-right wing that coexists uneasily today. American political discourse is incredibly narrow by international standards and this would probably be a good thing in the long term, and it also might not change much at all. If we want an "averaging" or "smoothing" effect, large district sizes are not a particularly good way to do that and we should implement another mechanism anyway. I'm sure we can figure out something in the 21st century to allow reasonable numbers of people to collaborate on works together. It's a pretty well established problem in the software world and the resulting solutions (revision control) have already bled out into the literary world (they're commonly used for publishing). The current situation where one powerful senator goes off for a month with a bunch of lobbyists to write a bill is awful and it's really hard to see how the situation could get much worse. At least you're talking about needing to bribe more than one person in order to get results, and it would be easy to pin down which rear end in a top hat is inserting the offending language since the changes are tracked. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 20:11 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 19:42
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VitalSigns posted:Do you have a link to what he actually said? Criticizing actual anti-equality black people for being huge hypocrites seems okay in my book. Or did he go full-on Freep with it and lay all the blame on black people as the reason we don't have equal rights? I can't listen right now, but pretty sure it would be this one: http://www.savagelovecast.com/episodes/108 If I remember, it was along the lines of "it's not fair to lay this entirely at the feet of black people, since plenty of white people voted for prop 8 too, BUT black people did vote for prop 8 in disproportionate numbers and it WAS a record turnout of black people. It's entirely possible that in an alternate universe where black people hadn't turned out so hard that it wouldn't have gotten over the top. So it's not entirely in the laps of black people, but they share a lot of the blame for this passing".
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Jun 4, 2014 19:18
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1337JiveTurkey posted:The idea that LGBT Americans are well off DINKs is popular but not really true. They're the ones that the media loves to talk about but don't make up a larger proportion of the demographic than their straight counterparts and the evidence points to them making up a smaller proportion in reality. Employment discrimination is still legal in many states and lesbians get hit by wage discrimination twice as hard. The thing about lesbians is absolutely true, but that also works in the favor of gay men. Rather than having two female incomes, or a female and a male income, they get two male incomes which gives them a small edge on hetero or lesbian households. Regardless there's SOMETHING going on, because gay male households are definitely higher earners than normal. quote:DUBNER: Let’s take a look at U.S. Census data. According to some analyses, median household income for heterosexual couples is about $86,000. For gay male couples, meanwhile, median household income is…$105,600, or nearly 20 percent more. And, for what it’s worth, lesbian couples have lower median income than heterosexual couples, about $84,000. So Danny Rosa seems to be right – gay men do seem to earn more. So the next logical question is … why? Higher education levels and being DINKs seem to be the likely cause to me. I think it's probably not related to location, since lesbians would have the same propensity to move to expensive cities that gay men do. Or the gender-income effect and the location-income effect cancel out or something. Or the entire thing could just be a selection effect from only selecting gay couples who are in a stable relationship, secure enough to publically identify, etc. Although then you run right back into the question of why this doesn't show up in lesbian couples, or the conclusion that some other effect is cancelling it out for lesbians. quote:ERICSON: What people have been able to do at the census is look at people who report being in a same-sex-partnered household. And obviously that’s a sub-sample of gay people as a whole. It’s a sub-sample because not all gay people are partnered, and it’s also a sub-sample because not all partnered gay people would want to disclose that to the census. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jun 4, 2014 |
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Jun 4, 2014 19:23
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Shageletic posted:And we should go after white people due to how Mormons voted. So stupid. So which demographic cross-tabs is it OK to make connections with voting trends over? Like, Mormons are generally agreed to have been a major force in passing Prop 8, is it OK to point that fact out? Is it similarly OK to point out that relatively conservative Baptist churches also played a role in getting Prop 8 passed? They were literally coordinating with those same out-of-state backers, and the ground game is just as, if not more important than, pouring advertising money into a state. quote:Indeed, Proposition 8 promoters worked closely with black churches across the state, encouraging ministers to deliver sermons in favor of the ban. Is it relative intensity of support that matters, or what? Because "african american" is one of the particular demographics that voted most strongly in favor of Prop 8 (70%). The only demographic with higher support was "weekly churchgoers" (84%) and "black women" (75%), generic "protestant" and "christian" categories are at 65%, everyone else is down near the 50% mark. Interestingly enough, black men are below the norm for both black people and religious people generally, at 62.5%. It's never fair to dump an election result squarely in the lap of one demographic on the cross-tab, since everyone's vote counts. But when you break it down there's clearly higher levels of homophobia or crab mentality ("they were never considered a third of a person!") or whatever in the black community circa 2008 given the huge intensity gap versus every other demographic. This is a forum that loves electoral hypotheticals, like "what if a few less liberals had voted third-party in 2000", and it's probably fair to say that black votes (good turnout and their strong split in favor of prop 8) was a deciding factor in pushing Prop 8 over the top. If I really had to pick one demographic that was responsible for Prop 8 passing, it'd be "religious" or "christian" for sure just based on size. But that doesn't change the fact that black people displayed significantly more support for Prop 8 than even generic "christian". That really sucks from a group that is still fighting its own civil rights struggle and is still within living memory of Jim Crow. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Jun 4, 2014 |
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Jun 4, 2014 20:14
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Shageletic posted:Uh I can't believe I have to say this but you can't subscribe political views on people just based on their skin color. I'm not "ascribing political views" to anyone, they ascribe those political views to themselves when they vote (and answer exit polls). If we're not allowed to look at the way groups of people vote, we might as well throw out the entire field of polling, because that's all that field does. I never ascribed political views to individuals, either. 70% of a group voting one particular way still means 30% didn't vote that way, but it's also an above-supermajority level of support that indicates a relatively uniform opinion across that group. In this case, that opinion was that gays shouldn't be allowed to marry, and it was further supported by significant political institutions coordinating with out-of-state backers to mobilize the group to vote in favor of Prop 8. The cherry on top was the bigoted rhetoric such as "gays don't deserve our support because they were never 3/5ths of a person". You can't just buddy up with incredibly regressive organizations (who themselves have a history of loving over black people) and spout bigoted rhetoric and then flush it down the memory hole, either. If this were the Mormon church trying to flush the way they treated black people down the memory hole, you'd never try to argue that popular institutional actions didn't matter because the church was a group of individuals. I'm willing to accept that the black community "evolved" on this issue recently, but that hadn't happened in 2008 and it's not proper to pretend that it had. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jun 5, 2014 |
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Jun 5, 2014 21:02
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VitalSigns posted:Read over your post. Think about the discrepancies in your language, where white homophobia is "the GOP" but black homophobia is the black community at large. Yes, I posted too soon, you quoted an older version. It's not fair to compare an individual politician to a group, so instead I rephrased that with a group. You still have a choice as to whether or not you are going to associate with conservative church and whether or not you are going to vote the way the pastor tells you. If the bigoted arguments hadn't worked on individual people, or if people hadn't exposed themselves to those arguments in the first place, the support wouldn't have been there. Not associating with people who spout bigoted filth is a solid way to prevent them from having influence. A lot of the issue, I think, boils down to religion being such an important institution in the black community, which is good in the sense that it allows black people institutions when they're largely shut out of many others within society, but bad in that churches tend to be a bigoted, regressive force in our society. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jun 5, 2014 |
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Jun 5, 2014 21:23
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VitalSigns posted:Right but once again, here it's not the "white community", you're selecting out a subgroup of people who largely agree ideologically, form a voluntary community of like-minded people, and have an official doctrine of homophobia. No, you're simply factually wrong here. Crosstabs on white people: 49% in favor, 51% against. Crosstabs on african americans: 70% in favor, 30% against. One of these groups shows a clear majority, and it's not white people, who on the whole don't even approve of the ban. And yeah there's plenty of times where white people get their votes analyzed as an aggregate. White people went 59% for Romney in 2012, for example, were one of relatively few demographics to break strongly for Romney, and can generally be stated to be a major factor in his remaining competitive. Pretty shameful there, but we were talking about Prop 8. Black people are more likely to be religious, but it's not fair to ignore that demographic trend just because it produces negative consequences, any more than we can pretend white people are all actually angels just because they actually tend to be wealthier on average and wealthier people are more likely to vote Republican. There were specific bigoted arguments against gays that were made within the black community that apparently resonated. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Jun 5, 2014 |
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Jun 5, 2014 21:36
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VitalSigns posted:But black people aren't oppressing me, and they're not oppressing Dan Savage. Voting in favor of gay marriage bans is absolutely oppression, no matter how much you want to pretend that it's not. You don't need to drag someone behind a truck to be working in support of those who would. Every win builds momentum against the civil rights movement, even if you are not personally in that state. Would it be fair to say that whites who voted against miscegenation or integration were not oppressing black people just because they didn't own a whites-only restaurant?
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Jun 5, 2014 21:45
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zoux posted:Erm, I thought we had already established that that 70% number was overblown? Ah, yes, a Ta-Nehesi Coates article, certainly an unbiased source that is worth discarding polling data from major organizations over. I love how he outright makes the "black people are more religious, that means that it's not fair to judge them for supporting conservative religious outcomes" argument I dismissed in my last post. I'm reading the report behind that, and the logic relies on two points: First, that pre-election polling (which underestimated African American turnout) showed lower support levels. The same churches that likely produced high black turnout also likely produced above-average support for Prop 8. Second, they take precinct data and trying to back demographics out of it. They do this with precinct data from liberal areas like San Francisco and Alameda. No poo poo, the bay area has below average levels of support. quote:We analyzed precinct‐level voting data on Proposition 8 from five California counties— This seems a lot less precise than exit polling, and seems likely to push any outlier groups (which is what African Americans are argued to be, in this case) back to the mean, even before you think about the fact that they are sampling the Bay Area. They agree that it's not a very confident approach, but then fall back on it correlating with pre-election polling. quote:Rather than I really don't see any reason to discard the exit polling just because an article said a thing. Even the study itself says this is not a very confident approach. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Jun 5, 2014 |
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Jun 5, 2014 21:49
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VitalSigns posted:Not only did Coates have links to support it, but the polling you're touting had 2000 respondents. With 13 million voters, the sampling error is about 2%, so the 49-51 falls within the margin of error. All of that is still pre-election polling, and falls into the same problem as the paper in the TNC article. Pre-election polling failed to predict the intensity of African-American turnout, and the likely cause of that was strong GOTV from black churches. Those same churches are also likely to have agitated for Prop 8, which would have increased the count among African Americans. More generally, pre-election polling failed to predict just how much of a blowout 2008 was going to be. Moreover, polling a relatively small group like African Americans always has a higher margin of error than a huge group like white people, there's literally no polling data you couldn't level this criticism at. The way I see it, we have two kinds of polling here. We have the kind where we ask someone a week ahead of time "are you likely to vote, and if so how will you vote", and we have the kind where we ask someone as they walk out of the polling center "how did you just vote". If there's more exit polling data, I'd love to see it, but the pre-election polling is inherently less credible to me in this election. quote:Edit: Jokes aside, Paul MuadDib (I don't actually think you're being racist on purpose or anything), do be careful about buying into narratives about other minorities being the cause of oppression. It's a well-known tactic of the privileged class to get the oppressed squabbling with each other about whether black people should be more grateful that gays voted for Obama, or if gay people are appropriating Civil Rights even though we were never slaves. Addressing homophobia (in every community) should be about building solidarity. So which is worse, the guy voting in accordance with the crab-mentality rhetoric, or the guy pointing out that the other guy is playing along with the crab-mentality rhetoric? You seem to be making a tone argument here, that it's divisive to point out that in 2008 the black (particularly religious) community was largely working in accord with regressive Mormons and other gay opponents. Moreso than the actual act of working in accord with regressive opponents! Like I said, I'm willing to acknowledge that a lot of evolution has taken place on this issue since 2008. But that's no reason to flush the "gays were never 3/5ths of a person" crap down the memory hole just because it's now obvious how ugly and awful a thing that was to be arguing. Again, this seems to be much like Mormons suddenly "evolving" on black people circa 1970. Sure, it's a good thing that they're on the right side now, but it doesn't justify erasing history so that we can pretend that was always the case. Nor should this be OK just because acknowledging the oppressing group was a minority means knowledging inter-minority strife. E: I'm on my phone right now and can't check the crosstabs, so I can't say whether Prop 8 would have passed if white people vanished from the face of the Earth Nov 3, but given that whites split 49-51 against I doubt it would change the outcome. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Jun 5, 2014 |
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Jun 5, 2014 23:01
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Berke Negri posted:One of the confusing things over the (white) gay activist outrage was that it appeared to imply that some sort of breach of allegiance on the issue had occurred between black leaders and (white) gay activists when there never was organizational solidarity to begin with in anyway that justifies the likes of Dan Savage's "I voted for Obama and THIS is how you thank me??" response. There kind of is though. When you see arguments like VitalSign's that there is a de facto obligation for minority groups to avoid tearing each other apart at the behest of the white majority, we are precisely talking about a breach of solidarity (but minority solidarity rather than organizational solidarity). Do you really feel there is no obligation for groups that have experienced oppression to support other oppressed groups, or at least not directly oppress them? It's an important question in the current Israel/Palestine conflict too. The tendency for abused to become abuser seems to happen on both a personal and cultural level due to a lack of ability to identify with other groups and a siege mentality. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 00:19
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VitalSigns posted:My argument is actually that you are wrong, you are posting wrong things, and you're cherry-picking a single result that supports your narrative while waving away every other poll with Rovian unskewing just-so stories. And in addition that you are inconsistent in your analysis because when white majorities pass bans (like they did every single other time) you recognize that ideology and religious bigotry are the issue; but the one solitary ban passed with millions of white voters in support but a gnat's-asshair more opposed you seize on race and ignore that age, ideology, religion, and political party affiliation were all better predictors of voting patterns. Sorry, it's hard to big posts on my phone. I'm not unskewing anything. There's exactly one exit poll of that election, and it shows African Americans with a 70-30 split in favor of Prop 8. To the extent we're "unskewing" (trying to explain that result) we're both doing it. You're pointing out that the crosstabs increase error, so that the result could be as low as 60% in reality (or potentially as high as 80%, of course). I'm suggesting that the pre-election polling didn't capture a small last-minute swing within a specific demographic. A couple posters on Box Turtle Bulletin did some analysis of that NGLTF report. There's some interesting problems with it as well - for example, they rely on an explanation of increased religiousity, which isn't supported by their data. quote:
They also base their conclusions on several polls that also appear to be outliers. For example, two of their five polls show majority African American opposition to Prop 8, which is clearly an outlier on the low end. quote:So how did African-Americans vote? Let’s go to this graphic from the NGLTF report: quote:
The other polls have exactly the same problems with large error margins as the exit polling. It could still be as high as 70%. There's more analysis of some of the other approaches there, it's all a little problematic in one way or another really. I think the other polling going into that was pretty flawed and produced results on the low side of things, but the exit polling was probably slightly on the high side. 60% seems a bit low, 70% seems a bit on the high side. The polling cited by the NGLTF report doesn't really support the religiousity claim... but that didn't stop them from agreeing with it. And we can't overlook bigotry just because people claim their religion excuses it. I mostly view this as a historical thing at this point, since so much progress has been made in the past couple years. That said, there's no reason to pretend that "gays were never 3/5ths of a person" wasn't a thing that was argued in certain circles five years ago. Shageletic posted:I'm going to be as delicate as I can here. You have a bigoted view of black people. I shouldn't have to defend myself because people whose only characteristic I share with is a measure of melanin voted a certain way. You don't see a black person, you see a representative of black people. And that is a cudgel that anyone familiar with history and any sort of empathy should stay well clear of. You haven't defended yourself against anything! You have posted in this discussion a grand total of twice, and both of them are  s about the fact that we're looking at polling crosstabs. I have never addressed you as a representative of black people, and in fact the only time I have ever communicated with you was when you complained that I was "ascribing political opinions to you based on the color of your skin".Shageletic posted:When you start ascribing political viewpoints to me just because people with my shade of skin vote a certain way, do you see where that ends up? Hint: nowhere good. Can you demonstrate that I have actually ascribed a political belief to you at all? Because I just double checked my post history, and the only post quoting you is in response to this. I don't even know what your political beliefs are, so I'm really not sure how I would go about doing that. Generally you seem to have a problem with the idea of looking at voting trends and think that analyzing them means you're claiming that every person in that demographic holds a certain belief or votes a certain way. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 01:55
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VitalSigns posted:So you now agree that the African American majority is more likely 8% rather than the overwhelming 20% you were claiming before, are you retracting these claims? If I had to guess, 60-65%, so something like 10-15%. 8% is definitely a slightly unlikely figure on the low side of things, but only to a slightly lower degree than the 20%, which actually lacks enough statistical support to be fully dismissed either. It's definitely not the 2%-against figure that is claimed in some of the NGLTF polls (used to come up with the 58% figure), however. Those are definite outliers too. But that said, 60-65% still puts African Americans as one of the demographics most strongly supportive of Prop 8, and the numbers put them just about exactly in line with "christian" or "protestant". We can't state with statistical confidence that African Americans as a demographic showed less support for Prop 8 than those other demographics, and in fact the numbers look just about equal. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 02:14
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VitalSigns posted:Significantly more, the same, possibly less, eh you know, whatever! I know it's a weird thing nowadays, but sometimes people actually post to have a discussion instead of an echo chamber. I'm willing to yield that the 70% might be a bit on the high side since the crosstab is small, I'm certainly not going to go with "double the margin of error on the high side". Like I linked earlier, you can look at a critical analysis of the NGLTF report here, I linked it earlier. There are certainly some weird aspects of it. They suggest that 58% is unlikely (on the low side), but more likely than 70% (on the high side). Thus, I interpolate those somewhat, with a little bias towards the 58%, which gives us a number of like 10-15% (60-65% support). Koalas March posted:VitalSigns, don't bother arguing with Paul. I seem to remember him making GBS threads up either the Trayvon or Let's Talk About Race thread. (Maybe it was both?) Never posted in either! Maybe you and Shagalectic should start a thread with all the posts I didn't make! Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 02:28
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Accretionist posted:I'll admit to skimming, but did you account for religiosity specifically as a confound? It would shift the composition of who was voting. It doesn't really matter, that's an explanation, not a justification. To quote myself earlier: Paul MaudDib posted:A lot of the issue, I think, boils down to religion being such an important institution in the black community, which is good in the sense that it allows black people institutions when they're largely shut out of many others within society, but bad in that churches tend to be a bigoted, regressive force in our society. Hiding behind religion as a shield for bigotry doesn't cut it. The NGLTF report (DBP poll) is a little mixed on this. African Americans tend to be (statistically confident) more likely to attend church weekly, but they also show lower confounding on this issue. AA voters who attend church weekly voted for Prop 8 at a lower rate than other weekly churchgoers, but AA voters who don't attend church weekly also voted for Prop 8 at a higher rate than other non-weekly churchgoers. This isn't statistically confident, and as we get farther away from the topline cross-tabs the error bars just keep getting bigger and bigger. 266 African American, Latino, and Asian American voters (combined) out of 1066 isn't a real big sample, cut that into individual races, then cut that in half to get frequent churchgoers, etc. We're probably talking a sample of <50 people now. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 02:38
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