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Majorian posted:Yeah, this is one area where I agree with Clinton: the media really hosed us all in 2016. I can't imagine a more obviously cynical display than poo poo like keeping cameras on Trump's empty podium. The media has always been a factor, and understanding how it works has swung presidential elections before. For all his many faults, Trump understood the media, and he obliged them with plenty of rating-grabbing showmanship.
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Sep 13, 2017 17:42
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theblackw0lf posted:I get the reason why Bernie outlaws private insurance his plan, but man is that an awfully difficult thing to ask Democratic politicians to embrace, since that carries risk of enormous backlash from the public. Who actually cares about this? Who actually obsesses over the details of their insurance plan? Maybe I'm just not rich enough or not high enough on the corporate ladder, but I've never scrutinized the long list of fine-print stuff my insurance won't cover and then said "man, my insurance is awesome and I deeply love this exact plan and want to have it forever". Changing your insurance is a big deal in the private market, because there's always gaps and the gaps aren't ever going to quite line up, but that's not a problem for a good government plan that covers everything. Who the heck, aside from CEOs and people who enjoy gambling with their financial stability or well-being, actually is all that attached to their current insurance plan? Do people quit their jobs en masse when their company changes insurance plans, providers, or conditions?
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Sep 13, 2017 20:30
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Gyges posted:I don't particularly want to champion Hillary's extremely average campaign that relied heavily on the support beams of Look At The Other Guy, It's Donald J. Trump. However, I'd say that of the various ingredients that lead to the baking of the poo poo cake that is the current administration, missteps by the Clinton Campaign are pretty much just the spices. Comey and The Media are the flour and liquids, sexism is the eggs, Weiner is the the sugar, passing out is the yeast, and Voter Suppression/the ED is the shortening. What about the ongoing decline of the Democratic Party? Since 2009, Congressional Dems have taken heavy losses in midterm elections and only slight gains in presidential election years. The Democratic waves of 2006 and 2008 - spurred largely Bush's unpopularity and Obama's charisma were the first time they'd controlled both houses of Congress since 1994. The context of the presidential election goes well beyond just Hillary Clinton - it's just another milestone in the slow decline of the Democratic Party under the stewardship of the centrist movement that moved into party leadership in the late 80s and early 90s.
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Sep 13, 2017 20:45
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theblackw0lf posted:The issue is more that if a person is generally satisfied with their health insurance, which polls show most are, then there is a good chance they will be reluctant to give up their plan for something that for them there is uncertainty about, even if all the evidence points to it being a better option. (This is why Obama emphasized "if you have a plan you can keep it" when selling ACA). A lot of people aren't generally satisfied by their health insurance, though. That's why there's such a push for healthcare reform in the first place - not only are people not satisfied with their own health insurance, but they're not happy about the entire insurance system as it currently exists.
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Sep 13, 2017 21:41
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Accretionist posted:Why did USPol get gassed/banned anyways? There was neither a Trump thread nor a Democrats thread back then, so basically all politics talk in D&D was crammed into a single thread that got roughly ten thousand posts a day, so the constant endless slapfights were impossible to moderate. Trump reactions, Hillary vs Sanders arguments, cop shooting discussion, Black Lives Matter, polling chat, all lumped into a single thread during the very height of election  season. Tempers were getting heated, the wounds of the primaries were even fresher than they are now, people were constantly flipping out about stuff, and the already-overworked mods had no way to keep up with that much posting.
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Sep 13, 2017 23:58
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Disengaging isn't really gonna be productive, but on the other hand, I can't really blame people for getting tired of fighting the uphill fight to save the Democratic Party from itself. If the Democrats want people to vote for them, they need to explore actually making changes that will get people to want to vote for them. If they're so insistent on resisting the left and shutting them out of US politics completely, well, it's not really the left's responsibility to rescue the Dems from electoral irrelevance. If the Dems want to succeed, they should be the ones working toward that, not struggling with all their might as the left drags them kicking and screaming toward basic concepts like "having a coherent message is good" and "maybe we should prioritize people over corporations".
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Sep 21, 2017 16:07
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Rigel posted:OK, this is a whole new level of stupid. Do you think congress lacks security? Congratulations, you just got a whole lot of idealistic idiots arrested, and they are now facing horrifyingly stiff prison sentences. Meanwhile the media narrative has shifted towards the Dems being an unreasonable, unruly mob, opinion in middle America shifts from "oh my God Trump is horrible" to "geez, both sides are bad", and persuadable votes who could have helped sink this horrible, very real health care bill harden to voting yes to show they don't stand with the mob. That leads to tens of millions of Americans losing health insurance and tens of thousands needlessly dying every year. The justification you give here for opposing direct action could have been ripped straight from white moderates in 1963, who claimed to support equal rights in principle but condemned the civil rights movement in practice. In fact, there are famous articles from that era that say pretty much exactly that, although I think MLK's response is probably better-written than any response I can give, so let's have some excerpts from the Letter From A Birmingham Jail. quote:You deplore the demonstrations taking place In Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative. quote:You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. quote:I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
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Sep 21, 2017 17:38
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Boon posted:I think where you and I diverge is that I sincerely, truly, do not believe that the US can exist as a country if the Democrats do not attempt to maintain the order and the laws of our institutions and instead shift to a hyper-partisan mentality. The mid-19th century is a pretty good example of what happens when the good guys repeatedly insist on compromising with the increasingly-partisan bad guys. The North compromised with the Southern slaveowners over and over again, compromising their morals and allowing injustice to flourish all for the sake of holding the Union together. Look how well that worked: every time Southern stubbornness was rewarded with undeserved concessions made for the sake of keeping the peace and avoiding a crisis, they simply doubled down even harder. Every time a theoretically neutral compromise deal was forged, the South immediately went about blatantly violating and abusing it in order to keep the advantage, while at the same time whining loudly about the few conditions they couldn't easily worm their way out of. For all the North's struggles to keep the country together and maintain the peace, it ended up pointless in the end, as the South threw unity to the winds as soon as they lost effective control of the country. A Representative beat another one into bloody unconsciousness on the floor of the House, and the House couldn't even gather the votes to expel him. Was Charles Sumner at fault for being too mean to the poor old violent slaveowning maniacs? Should he have been less extreme and more compromising towards the radical white supremacists who beat him so badly he spent three years recovering? Political polarization becomes a problem when one party is hyper-partisan. That alone is enough to destabilize the country, and it doesn't much matter what the other party does about it; compromise is only dodging the conflict and delaying the inevitable reckoning.
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Sep 21, 2017 20:32
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PerniciousKnid posted:And then the Civil War killed like five percent of the male population, so maybe maintaining the peace was not such a crazy idea, wrong or not. The point, which appears to have flown right over your head, is that maintaining the peace was impossible. The division was, in the end, impossible to solve with compromises. Those well-meaning Northerners were able to delay the conflict for decades, but in the end all they did was make it worse by giving the South plenty of time to radicalize and dragging the inevitable war into the era of industrialized warfare. When sitting US senators were leading armed militias across state lines to seize control of the Kansas Territory by force, do you think any Kansans were saying "golly gee, it sure is a good thing Northerners compromised with the South and repealed the standing ban on slavery in the territories in order to avoid a civil war over Kansas"?
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Sep 21, 2017 20:53
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PerniciousKnid posted:I'm not saying they were correct, just that I kinda see where they were coming from. But I forgot this is USPOL, where acknowledging someone's humanity or that they have a semblance of a valid concern is equivalent to ceding the entire argument to Evil and then castrating yourself. Avoiding civil war was a nice goal, yeah. But the Civil War ended up happening anyway, despite all their efforts. Given that it was all fruitless in the end, it's worth looking at the seventy years of concessions and sacrifices that were made for the sake of keeping the Union together in the face of the slavery issue, and asking whether it was really worth it. Seven decades of immense injustice, unfairness, and human misery, all for the sake of avoiding a war that eventually happened anyway. That's not exactly a flattering monument to the value of compromising in the face of hyper-partisanship.
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Sep 21, 2017 21:13
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axeil posted:This is also a good post and it's about one of my key frustrations: how do we solve the bad actor problem? I don't really have any answers but I'm coming to believe that a lot of the problems in modern America can be tied back to bad actors abusing the system for their own gain. Regulate this stuff, and have unethical behavior lead to the person losing their license to do that job. Couple it with reporting requirements so that it's difficult for a pattern of bad behavior to fly under the radar, and give regulators sufficient funding to investigate suspicious actors.
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Sep 21, 2017 22:22
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Taintrunner posted:To not say that economic and racial injustice are not directly intertwined is directly ahistorical and utterly reprehensible. They are intertwined, yes. However, they are not literally the same. Economic inequality is a major factor in racial inequality, but if you waved your magic want and instantly abolished class and completely eliminated economic inequality, racial inequality would still exist. The effects would be lessened, but many would still be there. Discrimination has deep ties to economics, but it's become so deeply rooted in our culture that it goes well beyond just economics. Economics is definitely a very important piece of the problem, but the message can't stop there - and if your response to concerns like this is to dismiss them as centrist propaganda and go on to browbeat minorities for not being convinced by your message, then you're absolutely part of the problem. steinrokkan posted:The current progressive movement is as a big tent as it gets. Judging its overall dynamics on the words of a small number of misguided reductionists is clearly not arguing in good faith. Imagine if the whole Democratic party had to make an address every time one of their supporters said something stupid. What's wrong with apologizing? Why is it that when. presented with the concerns of actual minorities, you have to get super defensive and declare their opinions to be not only incorrect but also straight-up illegitimate? Yes, I think Bernie's policies would probably have been better for black Americans than Hillary's policies, but that doesn't mean they were obligated to recognize that and vote Bernie. He had to convince them and build relationships with minority communities, and his attempts there were largely too little, too late. You want to talk double standards? How about the fact that poor rural areas voting for Trump over Clinton is explained away as "well, she would've been better for them, but it's the candidate's job to convince people of that and she clearly failed", but the same justification isn't being applied to non-millenial minorities voting Hillary in the primary? I think I've drifted a bit away from my point, which is, again: what's wrong with apologizing? Minority communities have endured centuries of injustice, the least you could do is acknowledge that maybe their complaints have some merit and are worth listening to and engaging with, even if you don't agree with them yourself! When you get defensive and insist that their problems are made-up or so minimal that they must not be arguing in good faith, you're dismissing and minimizing their concerns and feelings as straight-up not valid. When you insist that there's no need to specifically talk about racial inequality because cops won't shoot non-poor black people, you're ignoring the very real problems they face and declaring that the injustices of their daily life don't merit special attention. Why can't you just say "yes, absolutely, racism is bad and racial equality is an important priority" without bracketing it with an indignant rant about how you don't need to apologize because it's a made-up problem invented by Hillary Clinton to bring leftists down?
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Sep 22, 2017 14:08
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Casey Finnigan posted:I dunno man, I'm a Jew who's pretty upset sometimes by leftist antisemitism and the refusal to acknowledge and engage with it when it's pointed out. But uh that doesn't mean I need Bernie Sanders to publicly whip himself and apologize for the nasty attitudes of people who agree with some of his ideas. As far as I can tell leftists aren't proposing legislation or ideas that actively harm minorities (unlike dems in the 90s) unless there's something I'm missing. Like, lots of people in other minority rights groups end up subscribing to sometimes nasty antisemitic ideas as well but I'm not gonna refuse to support them unless they apologize to me because of the behavior of some people who are ideologically related. Why are leftists held to this standard but other groups aren't? Yeah, I mean, Donald Trump didn't apologize for having some open racists among his supporters, so why should anyone else have to? Clearly "maybe you should say that racism is bad" is just an unfair double standard demand cooked up by the dastardly centrist conspiracy to attack Bernie Sanders! Again, what exactly is wrong with saying "racism is bad"? What is wrong with condemning it and rejecting racists, instead of going on a defensive rant about how it doesn't really matter? Are you afraid that having the guts to acknowledge that racism exists everywhere will make you look worse than the movement whose most prominent member right now is a literal loving slaveowner? It's nice that you aren't bothered by it, but I'm also a Jewish person who's pretty upset about leftist antisemitism and it does bother me when people ignore it. I'm strongly pro-Palestine, but that doesn't mean I'm going to keep quiet and get defensive when a fellow member of the pro-Palestine movement says something anti-Semitic. If you don't want to hold yourself or groups you participate in to the same standard, good for you, but I'm going to hold them to that standard regardless of what you think about it because racism is too important of a problem to minimize and dismiss like that.
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Sep 22, 2017 14:54
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Iron Twinkie posted:I'd like to believe that racism on the left is more based on ignorance and defensiveness than malice. Addressing it though, to understate terribly, is really loving hard. It's hard because a big part of that will be having people understand and accept their own internalized bigotry from being born and raised in the toxic soup of our culture. Like, I know there is a part of my brain that has a split second reaction when I see a black dude in a hoodie or feels weird about trans people because of how I was raised and I need to be conscious of it and acknowledge that it's there and also both dumb and bad so it impacts my thoughts and beliefs as little as possible. I mean I know at some point I'm going to say something or do something that is bad or hurtful despite my best intentions and will need to be called out on it in a way that's constructive and react in away that's compassionate and not defensive. It means people leaving themselves open, honest, and examine themselves in a way that people have trouble doing with their significant other so the idea of doing the same in a larger group can be completely, utterly terrifying. The reason addressing it is hard is because people refuse to accept it. The problem is that when someone unconsciously does something racist and it's pointed out to them, they react super defensively. Instead of just saying "whoa, I didn't even notice. sorry, it wasn't intentional, I'll try to be conscious of it in the future", they deny that they've ever acted with the slightest bit of insensitivity, and often they go on to declare that the person pointing it out is just making it up as an excuse to attack them. That's why it's white fragility - instead of acknowledging that maybe they did say something that could make a PoC uncomfortable, they take it as a personal attack and lash out against the very idea that anyone could possibly think they said anything racist! Why can't people just own up to it, rather than insisting it's all part of the black/liberal/whatever conspiracy to take down whites/leftists/whatever? It's not a bad thing to condemn and apologize for racism. It's not an attack. Sure, the media might play it like that, but the media's gonna do what the media's gonna do. I don't think any amount of media malpractice is going to fool people of color who've heard the "how dare anyone accuse me of racism" song and dance a million loving times and would probably to hear a different tune for once. Casey Finnigan posted:Yeah five pages ago a dude was asking why the Democratic left couldn't just get it together to apologize for its racial missteps, while he wasn't asking that other groups that have had similar racial problems do the same. While I was saying that if you want one group to apologize and acknowledge racial issues they all should, and that calling on only the Sanders leftists to apologize for their racism and no one else plays into the narrative of leftists being white, privileged, Bernie Bros. Every group has "similar racial problems". The only question is whether they insist on being in denial about it, or acknowledge their failings and make an honest effort to improve. Besides, your basic thesis that leftists are the only people being asked to apologize for "racial missteps" (  ) is flat-out wrong. The Trump campaign was notoriously asked a great many times about their white supremacist followers, for instance, and the left has been attacking the center-left on a number of racist moves by Dem leadership that have come to light recently. Instead of whining about it, take the higher ground. Acknowledge and condemn racist behavior among individual leftists, make clear that such behavior is absolutely unacceptable...and then challenge Dem leadership to do the same thing about Hillary "prison slaves" Clinton and Nancy "DREAMer protesters are a Russian psyop" Pelosi.
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Sep 22, 2017 19:10
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steinrokkan posted:Absolutely nothing, except when people disingenuously demand others to apologize for actions of unrelated actors as a way of remove their credibility - again and again and again, no matter how many times the accused party had already made amends. Posters who insist on the collective guilt of all leftists are just trying to shut down a segment of the population by making any discussion they are part of about their supposed atonement, not about issues. This is exactly what I'm talking about, because this is almost word-for-word what you might hear from a white "moderate" bitching about affirmative action. Just change "leftists" to "Americans", "Democrats", "Republicans", "white people", or whatever you want. This exact wording could come from a white college student whining that he shouldn't have to give up his privilege because other white people owned slaves once. "I didn't do the racist thing, why should I have to apologize or pay reparations for the actions of others who did" is a common refrain among center-right racists. So is "white people already apologized for slavery, why do we have to keep apologizing over and over again, isn't it all just water among the bridge?" And of course let's not forget "people who insist on the collective guilt of all white people are just trying to shut down us hard-working successful conservatives". And the thing is, I know steinrokkan doesn't mean any of that and isn't thinking any of that. He's just thoughtlessly lashing out, because he sees accusations of racism and his first instinct is to get defensive and respond to it like it's an attack. But it's still virtually indistinguishable from a conservative thinkpiece about ending affirmative action. The minute an accusation of racism drives you to defensiveness and anger rather than to introspection and peaceful dialogue, you're done. That's all it takes.
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Sep 22, 2017 19:22
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Ytlaya posted:The only thing i'm contesting is the idea that the radical left specifically has a unique problem with black Americans that mainstream Democrats/liberals don't have. Sanders' problems were likely unrelated to his politics, and instead due to his history not involving much involvement with the black community.) I don't think anyone's actually said that, though! The focus is on the left in this thread because the majority of people in this thread are leftists. The reason that nobody's hurling criticism at Trump's failure to call out his racist supporters is because I don't think there's a single unironic Trump supporter in USPol. No one has said that black people inherently distrust the left or something. What people are saying is that this particular leftist movement still has work to do building solidarity and trust with people of color. And given enough time, and a little humility and openness, I'm sure they'll manage it! But the fact that Hillary had ties with the black community going back decades while Bernie had to scramble around building them at the last minute in the middle of a presidential primary shows how much ground there's left to cover. Koalas March posted:Does anyone have a source to verify if it was involuntary labor or a voluntary program in the first place? Typically, US prison labor is voluntary*. *Prisoners aren't forced to do it. But if they exercise their right to refuse, it'll be considered bad behavior and be held against them by prison authorities and parole boards, typically reducing the possibility of early parole. My big problem with the whole "but Hillary owned slaves" thing is that if you're confronted with accusations of racism, saying "well, the other guy is even more racist, so shut up and go yell at them instead" isn't actually a very good response. Yes, Hillary has a checkered past on crime and should be held to account on that...but that doesn't give white leftists the right to demand support from people of color.
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Sep 23, 2017 22:55
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Why is everyone trying to come up with new and innovative words for "lying"? Seriously, "performative wokeness"? Aren't there more important things to do in life than make up new words to insult your political opponents with?
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Sep 24, 2017 00:11
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Michael Bennett was held at gun point in Las Vegas because he was part of a crowd running away from the sound of gunfire. And he was lucky to get off with just that. A similar thing happened in Israel a couple years back - a terrorist shot up a bus station, and a security guard decided a random black guy running from the bullets might be a second shooter. Except that the guard shot him, and then he was literally loving lynched by a crowd of bystanders. Nobody checked his wallet to see if he was poor or rich when that happened.
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Sep 24, 2017 04:13
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GoluboiOgon posted:The problem is that the Democrats have generally been focusing on fighting racism without addressing economic inequality. Nah, I wouldn't really say this is true. The problem is that Democrats have been halfassing both the fight against racism and the fight against economic inequality, unwilling to make the systematic changes that are needed to fix either problem. When challenged on either issue, they blame the other issue as a way to pit members of their base against each other - a tactic that has worked wonderfully against some of the stupider members of the left. Bro Dad posted:Hell, he called out Roger Goodell on twitter this morning. Maybe he's gonna invite Sepp Blatter to the White House and pretend to like soccer because otherwise I don't see his endgame here. He's getting plenty of press and will almost certainly have an impact on news cycles to come as the fires and racial tensions he's fanned today rage throughout football. He doesn't need an endgame.
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Sep 24, 2017 17:00
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BetterToRuleInHell posted:Ok, I need some help here with Futuresight's last post and why it's so terrible, because I read it as saying Dems deserve criticism and lack of support from minorities if they don't follow up on their words with actions, and if their only solution is to fill positions and nothing else, then that's not good enough. You don't see why slipping "maybe they'll push for more black women CEOs, hahaha, liberals are so bad" into a discussion about racial issues might possibly look bad, especially if you don't follow lefty Twitter enough to know that it's an injoke derived from social justice discussions. Sure, KM could have given Futuresight the benefit of the doubt rather than jumping to conclusions...but why is it always the PoC who has to be the one to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that a dodgy-sounding statement isn't racist? Why couldn't people just apologize and explain the reference, rather than getting mad, accusing KM of posting in bad faith, and throwing a childish tantrum? It was a simple misunderstanding, based primarily on Futuresight making a reference that KM wasn't familiar with and which could easily be misconstrued as dismissive of racial equality. The discussion could easily have continued peacefully, except that as soon as KM made the slightest suggestion that his remark could have been racially insensitive, white fragility kicks in and suddenly everyone's throwing a fit at the mean PoC who dared to be uncomfortable with something a white person said.
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Sep 25, 2017 21:45
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Boon posted:Something I've never really pondered before about a 100% socialist economy is how are things valued? Like, if someone is paid for the 'actual' value of their labor, how is that determined? Why should people be paid for the 'actual' value of their labor? Hell, even asking that question involves buying into several premises that shouldn't necessarily be taken for granted, such as the idea that different people's labor has different "value".
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Sep 26, 2017 06:06
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Condiv posted:Since we seem to have a lot of people who identify as centrist, what is with the centrist fascination with tax credits? They think it appeals to the "middle class" and dodges many right-wing criticisms. It allows them to present their ideas as tax reductions rather than government spending, it allows them to present their ideas as slight tweaks to existing payments rather than all-new programs with all-new bureaucracies, its not as clearly tied to the budget as spending is, and the upper classes they're trying to appeal to don't care about most of the drawbacks of tax credits. I'm sure it would probably be a brilliant strategic move if not for the fact that few people actually care about any of that stuff, as well as the fact that they use the tax credit framing for basically everything.
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Sep 26, 2017 17:28
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Neurolimal posted:
Those other necessities must be pretty important too if people are willing to starve for them! Restricting what benefits can be spent on doesn't actually address the fact that people can't afford necessities, it just shifts what they're unable to afford.
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Sep 26, 2017 17:53
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Condiv posted:
Where does this come from? Which group produced it? It keeps getting posted and laughed at, but never sourced.
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Sep 26, 2017 20:43
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Grapplejack posted:I can't believe this didn't get more discussion in the thread, they're doing social engineering on a country-wide scale to try to stoke racial tensions. They're not engineering a drat thing, they're just pouring ad money into the super obvious pre-existing lines of conflict in our society. The nation is heavily divided, and they're just encouraging those divisions. The important thing is that they're not creating anything that wasn't already there - they're just twisting the volume dial a little bit. Condiv posted:i think nazi uprisings count as violence, and will almost certainly lead to increased violence worldwide if it gets worse. so yeah the statement is flawed as gently caress. we have a nazi sympathizer (if not an actual fascist) who wants to annihilate north korea as our leader too, doesn't seem like non-violent times to me at all Not just us, either. Right-wing maniacs are gaining power and influence all over Europe, the Middle East is in utter chaos, the resulting flood of refugees is encouraging reactionaries and fascists all over the planet, the number of pariah states with nuclear weapons is growing, various rival superpowers are actively expanding their influence and in some cases openly annexing land from their neighbors, and much much more. We're not exactly living in an era of global peace and harmony right now.
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Sep 27, 2017 01:12
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Tulip posted:Could you name such a date? The late 90s/early 00s? You know, before the Global War on Terror, the total destabilization of the Middle East, the Great Recession, the global right-wing resurgence, nuclear Iran and North Korea, the Israeli swing toward extremism, and the new wave of Russian expansionism? To say nothing of global warming, the slow demise of the nuclear industry, the growth of the antivax movement, the dismantling of labor rights and minority protections all over the world, and more. Sure, we have iPhones now, but when it comes to peace, stability, and general prosperity, poo poo has been going downhill ever since the turn of the century. I won't go so far as to claim that's the correct answer, though, because there is no correct answer. It's simply too large and vague a premise to meaningfully quantify or logically argue - first you have to define "best", and that's philosophy, not politics.
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Sep 27, 2017 04:04
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Ytlaya posted:
There are a bunch of thinkpieces from 1900-1913 that say pretty much exactly this. They stopped after 1914, for some reason. Boon posted:An entrepreneur rarely has the resources, but that's a minor quibble at best. What an entrepreneur does have is an insight into an unmet need in the market, what you would consider 'what most people want'. If they did not there would not be a market and the venture would fail. Businesses fail all the time, though. There's plenty of entrepreneurs who either didn't actually identify an unmet need or couldn't manage to profitably address it. It's not good to ignore the high failure rate for businesses, especially now when a tech bubble is causing many of these failed companies to attract huge amounts of investment before finally going down in flames. For example, the infamous Juicero attracted a solid $120 million worth of venture capital from people who apparently thought a $700 machine with one-use juice packs was filling an unmet need. Pembroke Fuse posted:Do you see no possible situation under which US military intervention is justified? Those are all essentially excuses, though, because the main factor in whether the US military will respond to a genocide or not is whether intervention would suit US interests in general. We don't fire off these million-dollar missiles as charity, and we're perfectly fine with genocides as long as the government commiting them is somewhat stable and aligned with US foreign policy. Also, one of the things on your list is not like the others! It's pretty gross to lump "someone besides us forcibly intervening in small countries' foreign policy" in with genocide.
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Sep 27, 2017 14:12
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Pembroke Fuse posted:I was going to bring up the UN, but given that the security council is often composed of the belligerent parties, it's hard to see it ever actually doing anything but small out-of-way poo poo that no one cares about. I really wish I could support the UN more, because I do see it as a pathway to legitimate form of intervention and conflict resolution (they often do good work after the main conflict has ended)... but given the current structure, I don't think it can actually affect anything significant. This is a feature, not a bug. The countries that have permanent Security Council seats and vetos are the countries that no one would actually enforce anything against anyway. It's an open admission that the UN isn't capable of enforcing anything against significant powers. The UN tends to avoid official decisions when it knows that official decision will have no effect, in order to avoid making its powerlessness too obvious. The core problem is that no major country is willing to put their own interests aside and commit their resources to a collective good. They make excuses for ignoring crisises caused by allies and client regimes, ignore international criticism of the crisises they're deliberately causing, and only endorse action when they see an opportunity for their own gain and profit. There is absolutely no country acting in the global interest or in the interest of humanity, and any of them that claim to are simply using it as a pretext to pursue their own interests.
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Sep 27, 2017 16:49
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Pembroke Fuse posted:Yeah, I get that. It basically means that the UN is pretty much entirely useless in terms of intervention and conflict resolution, which kind of comes back around to my original point. Namely, that it's up to imperfect and self-interested countries to craft imperfect and self-interested policies, and that this is pretty much all we're going to get for the next while. Given the fact that this is the foreseeable future, we may as well attempt to actually interact with or attempt to shape those policies somewhat. Disengaging even from something as odious as foreign policy could just mean handing the shaping of these policies over to the worst possible actors. This presumes that the US is a good actor, or at least one of the better actors. Sure, we might not be the absolutely worst actors out there, but looking at the trail of destruction we've sown over the latter half of the 20th century, it's hard to call us the best actors either.
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Sep 27, 2017 18:20
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Koalas March posted:
In general this is a cool and good idea, but goon charity drives have a decidedly mixed history. It might be better in TGRS since there seems to be a pretty strong core of regulars there, but that didn't stop that one guy from tricking LF into buying him skinny jeans.
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Sep 28, 2017 21:37
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JUST MAKING CHILI posted:I'm no tax policy wonk but how the heck do you respond to someone that tosses you the "45 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax" line? The 45% of Americans that don't pay any income tax possess, collectively, maybe 1-2% of total US wealth. They don't pay income tax because they hardly have any income to tax - though that doesn't stop them from taking the brunt of some of our more regressive taxes, like sales tax and payroll tax.
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Sep 29, 2017 04:22
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The only problem with police unions is that every other union should have that same level of power. Police unions defend some pretty abhorrent poo poo, but I'm not inclined to begrudge them for that since defending cops is literally their sole reason for existing, and taking issue with that means undermining the very point of unions. The question is why they have so much power when most other public unions are essentially powerless, to say nothing of private unions.
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Sep 29, 2017 13:27
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forkboy84 posted:No, the actual problem with police unions is that they never show solidarity with other workers, and are actively a tool of the oppressive ruling class. They have at times. There hasn't been a whole lot of recent union activism to point to, but for example, the police unions opposed the 2011 Wisconsin union-busting bill despite being specifically exempted from it. I'm really suspicious of arguments against police unions, because unions are things that should carry out their purpose even when (indeed, especially when) that purpose is unpopular. Certainly, there are a lot of bad police unions, but if you're cheering the prospect of an anti-union SC ruling because it might take police unions down too, then you're just demonizing unions as a whole.
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Sep 29, 2017 17:53
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Chilichimp posted:"Lone Wolf" is just a designation for a single person committing a mass shooting, it doesn't say anything about their motives by itself. "Lone wolf" means "completely solo, no ties to any other group or organization". The implication being that it was an isolated lone crazy that no one could possibly have identified or predicted, not a political act from a group likely to commit or support or encourage more such attacks in the future. Given that the militia movement is pretty big in that region, it's definitely premature to call him a lone wolf.
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Oct 2, 2017 14:40
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Arrgytehpirate posted:If only those concert goers had guns they would have been able to defend themselves from getting shot enfilade 32 stories up It was a country music festival in an open carry state, I'm sure there were guns everywhere. Turns out when bullets start raining down on a crowd out of nowhere, people's first instinct is to panic and run for cover, rather than instantly divine the location of the shooter and coolly gun them down with a carefully aimed shot just like in that action hero movie they watched last night.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:51
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On another note, RIP worker's rights and class actions. Kennedy says everyone can all just hire the same lawyer separately and it's basically as good as class actions, right?quote:Justice Anthony Kennedy, often the swing vote in major cases, asked questions that signaled sympathy to employers, as did two fellow conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
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Oct 2, 2017 23:15
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Democrazy posted:I don't understand how anyone can believe in employer arbitration is a good thing without the financial incentive of a politician. Who is stupid enough to buy that line intrinsically? Kennedy doesn't believe that power disparities exist, except for when the government creates them with things like affirmative action, which he hates because he thinks racism ended forever a long time ago. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Stopped clock: the media generally is partially responsible because reporting mass shootings perpetuates the suicide cluster. It's no different from how reporting on celebrity suicides increases copycat suicides, etc. Perhaps, but copycatting is only really a problem when the thing is fairly easy to do. Copycat mass shootings are a big worry because we've done absolutely nothing to make it more difficult to commit mass shootings, and we never will. No one complains about 9/11 coverage causing copycat plane hijackings, because after 9/11 we put in place a wide variety of restrictions, laws, and security measures dedicated to making sure that it couldn't happen again. Sure, much of it is security theater and some of it is really overreaching, but for some reason no one listened to the people who complained that those measures violated civil liberties or wouldn't actually be effective at preventing the crime in question! The people insisting that gun regulation of any kind would be a grave crime against innocent Americans are, for the most part, the same people who cheer on refugee bans, rally behind Sharia law bans and surveillance against Muslims, and call for the deportation of all Hispanic and Muslim immigrants. They always get their way, and no one seems to care whether their arguments make sense or whether their proposals would actually be effective. Why doesn't gun control get that same level of latitude? What's with the double standard?
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Oct 3, 2017 16:23
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botany posted:i've been looking for statistics on subsistence hunting since i'd like to know as well how common it is, and one of the first things i've noticed is that especially in alaska, subsistence hunting correlates strongly with being way the gently caress out in the wilderness. the problem there isn't primarily poverty, but literal distance from civilization. you could have a basic universal income and people in those communities would still hunt because the next walmart isn't exactly around the corner. For exactly the same reason, those people are very rare and few in number, because we're talking mostly about very remote places with extremely low population density. Alaska has the lowest population density of any US state, and the 3rd lowest total population. Not only that, but half that population lives in the Anchorage Metropolitan Area; they're not exactly in deserted wastelands. Sure, if you're living in someplace like the Borough of Yakutay, which is a 10,000 square mile county with one city in it, you can't just run down to the grocery store. But on the flip side, there's only six hundred people in that entire area. It's a place the size of Massachusetts with a total population comparable to the number of people killed or injured in Sunday night's mass shooting. Or how about North Slope Borough, Alaska, a county the size of Utah with a total population of roughly 9,500 - which is less than the number of people killed by guns (not including suicides) so far in 2017. Sure, there are people whose lifestyle may depend on hunting. But there are people whose lifestyle depends on having a car, and that sure doesn't stop the government from yanking their license if they get into trouble. Actually, the same goes for guns. Alaska is one of the more generous states regarding gun rights, but it still bans felons from owning a gun for 10 years after their sentence (including probation) is complete. If Alaskans literally couldn't survive without guns, I'd expect to see a hardship exception or something for that law.
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Oct 3, 2017 21:23
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gowb posted:Can someone explain or link me to something explaining the Puerto Rico situation? I glean my news from a diversity of sources and I'm having trouble because they're saying completely different things. My uncle knows a family on the southern coast who claim the US media is blowing it out of proportion to make trump look bad...but then you get the reports that make it sound like everyone inland is dying. If there is some sort of comprehensive evidence based reporting I'm missing, please point it out to me. I desperately want to believe we're doing right by these people. A big hurricane completely wrecked Puerto Rico, we sent maybe half as much aid as we sent to Texas and Florida, and the aid isn't very effective because the storm completely ruined basically all of the island's infrastructure and logistics. Hospitals are running out of fuel to run their generators. Supply distribution is going at a snail's pace because the ports are wrecked, the roads are blocked, and most people don't have access to working phones. The number of dead is so low because no one has had time to count the bodies; it will almost certainly continue to increase as infrastructure is restored and authorities gain access to previously-isolated areas. And naturally, there's tons of fake news out there, as alt-right media makes poo poo up out of whole cloth so they can insist that the president's doing great and that all the problems are liberal conspiracies to sabotage PR to make Trump look bad.
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Oct 4, 2017 02:39
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gowb posted:Can someone explain or link me to something explaining the Puerto Rico situation? I glean my news from a diversity of sources and I'm having trouble because they're saying completely different things. My uncle knows a family on the southern coast who claim the US media is blowing it out of proportion to make trump look bad...but then you get the reports that make it sound like everyone inland is dying. If there is some sort of comprehensive evidence based reporting I'm missing, please point it out to me. I desperately want to believe we're doing right by these people. gowb posted:No offense but do you have a source? I know people from Puerto Rico who are saying this is all bullshit. So which is it? Is it your uncle who knows people on PR, or is it you?
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Oct 4, 2017 02:42
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