|
Raenir Salazar posted:The problem here is this means no attention, or effort being paid to such places, which doesn't seem very fair to the people who live there. This is true, but I don't think your conclusion is correct. The electoral college isn't fair, in the sense that every voting-eligible American has an equal amount of decision power. Some voters are much, much more likely to cast a deciding vote than others. So it makes obvious tactical sense that the primary process should prioritize picking a candidate that they like, who energizes them. It obviously conflicts with a rhetorical dedication to "recognizing every American equally" etc - in that case they should just do all the primaries on the same day - but when there's as much on the line as in a Presidential election, any well-organized political party should make reasonable compromises to gain and keep power.
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2024 03:33
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 15:43 |
|
|
I'd rather see people get the day off than online voting. This is the most important thing our government does, its accessibility is important but so is having a secure method that voters trust. Our current system is very secure. Moving it to the Internet would make it a lot less secure - not even the vote submission portal getting hacked, but we'd inevitably have people getting tricked into voting on a fake website instead, or losing control over their computer or their credentials so someone else can vote as them. Someone's vote doesn't go through because they lost WiFi and they say it's because they chose a certain candidate. Nobody would trust the results anymore. Voting and vote-counting needs to happen using exclusively trustworthy machines, unfortunately that doesn't include personal computers as convenient and good for turnout as it would be.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2024 04:11
|
|
|
Tuxedo Gin posted:There is no mechanism in American society for "people get the day off". The people who are most unlikely to be able to vote due to work are the same people who don't get weekends or national holidays off. Fair enough. Let's say, have a system to make sure everyone gets at least one workday off during the final week in which polls are open. Also keep popularizing vote by mail, make enrollment in vote-by-mail part of the process of registering for high school/college or getting any ID. It extends the convenience of the process almost as far as online voting, while using a system that people comprehend easily and generally trust, and which warrants that trust.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2024 04:28
|
|
|
Sir Lemming posted:Basically we need an open-source Bible. (Creator's Common License) This is exactly what Sefaria.org is.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2024 14:42
|
|
|
Uncle Boogeyman posted:You should probably get that checked out Maybe it's a stutter. To me, as someone who's known men of his age who were dealing with actual neurological conditions and men of his age who were just generally slowing down and getting foggier, Biden's obviously in the second group. Have any stories indicated that Biden is struggling to do the behind-the-scenes work or is it just a decline in his capacity to go off-script? Personally I would not mind at all if, a la Wilson or Reagan, Biden became a figurehead whose administration was guided by the people around him. At every point where Biden diverges from the median DNC bureaucrat, as far as I know, it's for the worse (e.g., personal opposition to marijuana legalization, much less willing to even criticize Israel) Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Feb 10, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2024 14:46
|
|
|
KillHour posted:Whoever bought that title was clearly loving pissed. I don't know the exact conversation that led to it, but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were probably rightly pissed, given the subject matter. I'm not going to stand in front of someone who is rightly pissed about an ongoing genocide and say "you're lumping in innocent people with the genociders; you should really be more careful." Is this your same attitude toward anti-Japanese bigotry during WWII or anti-Muslim/anti-Arab bigotry after 9/11? That those people were rightfully mad about real atrocities, so if they're "lumping in innocent people" too, then  ?"Lumping in innocent people" with the perpetrators of violent atrocities, either real or imagined - that's how violent bigotry, up to and including genocide, is incited. It is very obviously what we are seeing in Israel right now - there are many parallel Zionist versions of your post saying "yes, many Arabs are not responsible, but the user saying that all their souls belong in hell was very mad about 10/7, so..." Because it's intellectually easier and politically useful, there's an inevitable human tendency to blame horrible crimes on entire racial or religious cohorts instead of their specific perpetrators. We all know this. What most of us also know is that this is a dangerous and disgusting tendency which civilized people shut down immediately, ideally only with words. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Feb 11, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 11, 2024 23:24
|
|
|
I think one difference which hasn't been explored is that Trump would correctly see the war as politically advantageous to him and want it to go on. It's a war where the "good guys" are right-wingers beloved by evangelical Christians and the "bad guys" are all Arab and generally Muslim. Basically all of Trump's base is energized by it and it scares independents/swing voters into wanting the party they see as stronger on foreign policy (generally the Republicans) Biden, I think, correctly sees the war as a political liability that in an ideal world would never take place/conclude asap - he's too ideologically committed to Israel, or afraid of his party's pro-Israel wing, to go very far here. But he knows that the war makes him look bad particularly among people who voted for him in 2020 - (both anti-Zionists and left-wing-except-for-Israel Jews). He wants to see the war ended but first Hamas has dismantled, and all hostages returned, etc. For this reason I think there are many potential peace deals that Biden would pressure Israel to accept and Trump would pressure Israel to reject. Also, Biden has not (afaik) used the diplomatic crisis as a pretext to directly antagonize Iran, while Trump, who antagonized Iran throughout his prior administration, would absolutely be doing so now.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 00:01
|
|
|
Raiad posted:I'm going to go out on a limb and say that "people don't understand probability" is not really a leading cause of gambling issues, in the same way that "people don't understand that heroin is bad for you" is probably not a leading cause of drug addiction. Yeah this is my intuition. Everyone knows that, on average, gambling on sports loses you money. But they gamble anyway because: 1) they're having a good time with money they are prepared to lose, basically purchasing a thrill, or 2) they're addicted to it or 3) they have a delusion that they personally know so much about the upcoming game that they can beat the market. None of these depend on a poor math understanding or would improve with better math understanding.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 18:02
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Theoretically if you *really* beat high level probability education into their skulls, turned everyone into a mathlete, it might make some difference, mostly by reducing the likelihood people engage at all with gambling in the first place ("why would I let myself get scammed?") Again this depends on the idea that people don't already know that the house always wins, but everyone knows the house always wins. They either enjoy losing to the house, are addicted to gambling, or have a basically narcissistic delusion that they can beat the house. None of these are math comprehension issues. I work with a bunch of graduate-degree statisticians and about half a dozen of them had money riding on the game, two of them were betting all season long, we used to have a scratch-off pool in the office before the employee who ran it got a new job, etc.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 18:11
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:That isn't my proposal. This is a self-selected group of university level students in a statistics class vs. a control group of other university students. By virtue of already being in university they're long, long since beyond the relevant level. I'm talking about increasing math education for middle schoolers. Is there proof that a significant portion of problem-gamblers are people who are not aware that, in general, gamblers lose their money? I think pretty much everyone knows heroin is bad for your health, gambling is bad for your budget, using your phone all day is bad for your productivity. People do these things *anyway*, not because they don't understand that what they're doing is going to impact them negatively. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Feb 12, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 20:12
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:I suspect studies of college students will be the best available data obtainable on this question, given the ethical restrictions on studies involving children. This would be a better design for answering the questions being asked in this thread, and it would get past an Internal Review Board: 1. Randomly assign hundreds of students to anti-gambling education or control group. 2. Check back in 5, 10, 20, 30 years later and measure how often they gamble/impact.of gambling behavior on their lives. This kind of longitudinal work is the only way to measure programs like DARE and what Xiahou Dun is proposing is basically DARE but with gambling instead of drugs.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 20:21
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Do kindly gently caress off with telling me what my own argument is. You clearly don't understand it if you think I mean math-DARE. Woah, I wasn't trying to upset you and I'm sincerely sorry I did. This is just policy talk, let's chill out. It sounded to me like you were proposing something very similar to DARE - a program aimed at young students to communicate the plain dangers of addictive and self-destructive behaviors that we know will be advertised them as they get older. The best way to measure the effectiveness of such a program would be a longitudinal study like what's been conducted for DARE, sex-ed programs, and other interventions aimed at helping students avoid dangers that they're going to encounter as they get older. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Feb 12, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 20:29
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Sorry, I'm getting frustrated by people responding to made up versions of my proposal. I get it. It's frustrating when people misinterpret what you're trying to say. I'm sincerely interested - I used to be a math teacher. I'm skeptical, but I'm interested. I see that what you're describing differs from DARE in terms of the intensity of treatment. I still think a longitudinal study is the best/only way to study the effectiveness of 'preventative education programs" including DARE, other anti-drug curricula, sex Ed, and the anti-gambling curriculum you're describing. And (responding to a different user here) I don't think it would present ethical issues - you can randomly assign kids to education programs within reason, and you can send them surveys for as many years after that as you want. That's really all I meant by comparing your proposal to DARE, I'm sorry if I implied that your proposal was bound to be ineffective/laughable like DARE is generally considered to be today. I agree with you that the college-student study is not really applicable to what you're describing. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Feb 12, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2024 20:40
|
|
|
Seems to me that Biden said "it was around when Beau died - it was one or maybe two years earlier, gently caress, was this 2016 or 2017, Beau died in '16, no, '15..." and Hur somewhat insensitively wrote down "this old coot can't remember when his son died." Then Biden was furious about it and, as he often does, stretched the truth/misspoke as if Hur had directly asked/confronted him about the timing of his son's death.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2024 17:34
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:I mean under that scenario hur did do exactly that he just did it through the press rather than to bidens face Yeah to be clear I think Hur I'd the one acting unreasonably here the same way Comey was unreasonable in 2016 - either put someone on trial or not, but declining to put them on trial while excoriating them to the press is just prosecuting them in a different court where they don't have the same rights to defend themselves or clear their name. It gets into "innocent until proven guilty" territory imo.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2024 17:49
|
|
|
Staluigi posted:She emerged fully formed... You think she just fell out of s coconut tree? She exists in the context of all in which she lives and what came before her.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2024 23:08
|
|
|
The Artificial Kid posted:But racism comes down to excusing the abuse of our-groups for materialistic purposes. The old saying "everything is really about sex, except sex, which is really about power" is still true, but in America we can also have "everything is really about race, except race, which is really about money."
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2024 14:35
|
|
|
zoux posted:Honestly, individual states deciding who can and cannot be on the ballot seems like a nightmare. I agree, I think the only reasonable standard for keeping a candidate off the ballot for this reason is "actually convicted, in a federal court, of inciting an insurrection etc." Or I guess a federal-congressional decision but even that seems to run the risk of bullshit "convictions." If it were up to the states then only a minority of states would actually have both a Democrat and a Republican on the ballot. GOP-trifecta states like Florida, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa would remove Biden from the ballot - and Nebraska where he'll probably get an electoral college vote from one of the districts. The real problem is that our justice system moves so slow that a man can try to broad-daylight rig an election and 3-4 years later the trial hasn't even begun yet. Defendants have rights and prosecutors need to move carefully, but if we take the electoral campaigns of insurrectionists seriously then it needs to take less than 4 years for a former President to be convicted for insurrection. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Mar 4, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2024 16:29
|
|
|
We need more daily drinkers - alcohol makes people richer and better-educated.quote:The drinking rate among U.S. adults differs more by household income than by any other standard demographic characteristic. According to the 2021-2022 data, 80% of adults aged 18 and older living in households earning $100,000 or more say they drink, far exceeding the 49% of those earning less than $40,000. The rate among middle-income earners falls about halfway between, at 63%.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2024 03:55
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:Jill loving Stein winning the election is just as likely as your one vote for Biden making any difference. That is to say, both have zero probability. If you live in California, sure. If you vote in the right swing state, your probability of casting a pivotal vote is around 1 in 10 million. That paper is old so maybe now it might be between 1 in a million and 1 in 100 million. That's small but not so small that people don't make decisions in pursuit of it. If you buy a Powerball/Mega Millions ticket, the odds of getting the jackpot are about 1 in 300 million. And these tickets sell very well, but my homemade "zero probability of winning" lottery tickets sell very poorly! The difference between zero and non-zero. Hard to visualize the most likely scenario where Jill Stein wins an election - maybe if Trump and Biden are both caught, on camera, committing heinous crimes? Probably not even then.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2024 17:16
|
|
|
haveblue posted:The most likely scenario where Stein wins is that the GOP or DNC nominates her. There are no scenarios where those parties are both participating in the election and the Green Party gets more votes I think you're right and the odds of this are around 1-in-a-trillion if not lower, while the odds that someone in the right state might cast a pivotal vote are thousands of times better.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2024 17:37
|
|
|
James Garfield posted:(assuming you care about other people getting aid). Yeah, you have to have a lot of empathy for your vote to be worth it on strictly rational swing-the-election grounds. If you say that voting costs about $10 of your time and effort, and it has a 1 in 10-million chance of making a difference, then that implies that Biden being elected over Trump (or the other way around) is worth $100 million to you. For the country it's worth much more than that. But is it worth that much for you personally? Another way to visualize that is that you'd rather see Biden beat Trump than see Trump beat Biden AND you get $100 million with no taxes on it. I think the average American, given that choice, SHOULD choose "Biden beats Trump." But the average American, given that choice, WOULD choose to be a centimillionaire in a country run by Trump than keep their current financial position in a country run by Biden. Maybe I'm underestimating the average voter - which never lost a politician an election - but I think it's more that voting is driven by factors other than wanting to swing the election - virtue signalling, civic duty expectations etc.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2024 18:30
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:If two events have probabilities within 0.00001% of each other, it's more than fair to say that they are equally likely. You can try to move the goalposts to "proportionately likely" but that wasn't my claim. What you actually said is that they both have "zero probability." Casting a pivotal vote definitely doesn't have zero probability (if you live in the right state). Now you're saying that the probabilities might not be zero, but they're very similar. That's a completely different idea. One-in-ten-million is not "equally likely" to one-in-ten-trillion just because they're "within 0.00001% of each other." The former is a million times more likely than the latter. A million is not equivalent to one. I'm not trying to tell anyone how to use their time, money, or votes - there's a separate thread for all that. I'm just trying to correct the math here. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Mar 10, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2024 18:56
|
|
|
The post was responding to me and by "heinous crime" I really meant "salacious action that makes the candidate look totally untrustworthy to virtually every American voter." Using hard drugs on camera like Rob Ford, engaging in totally taboo sexual behavior on camera, etc. This meaning excludes both improper document storage and enabling a war crime against the civilians of a third-world country. I don't think any federal-level American politician, in history, has bungled their career as badly as Trump and Biden would both have to bungle theirs for a third party candidate to have a remote shot at victory. If I'm wrong about that I would sincerely love to hear the story.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2024 19:33
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:I'm literally a stats prof and I don't need your correction. I'm not trying to correct you as a person or as a scholar. I just disagree with a post on the internet. I'm sure that in conducting your scholarship you exercise totally different ways of talking about numbers than when posting on forums on a weekend. If we're discussing and comparing events with very low probabilities, then the differences between 1-in-10-million, 1-in-10-trillion, and zero are meaningful. I don't think it's pedantry, I think it's the level of precision required when comparing extremely improbable events to each other. When we're talking about a 50% probability, precision to the ten-millionths place is pedantry. When we're talking about a one-in-ten-million event, it's necessary. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Mar 10, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2024 20:11
|
|
|
zoux posted:When was the last actual American serial killer? Seems like the invention of "the shared database" kind of made that MO untenable. The Gilgo Beach guy was just arrested last year but Wikipedia says the last murder was in 2011.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2024 15:31
|
|
|
Charliegrs posted:Is it really anticompetitive for a company to have it's fingers in so many pies? Because I always thought anticompetitive meant a company buys out all it's competitors. As far as I know there's still plenty of music streaming services and movies studios besides Apple. But maybe I'm missing something. Yes vertical integration can be anticompetitive, here's a talk on it from 29 years ago but it's still a good breakdown of the basic concerns. Basically a vertically integrated firm can manipulate one market to impede competitors in another (for example, Apple using its ownership of the app store to delist apps that don't integrate with certain Apple services) quote:How can a vertical merger increase barriers to entry? The first general category of anticompetitive theories posits that, in certain instances, vertical integration can foreclose rivals from access to needed inputs or raise their costs of obtaining them. For example, in a recent article, Professors Riordan and Salop have developed further anticompetitive theories of "raising rivals' costs," where a vertically integrated company may be able to increase the costs of its rivals in either the upstream or downstream market. Such foreclosure effect can raise prices or reduce quality or innovation to consumers downstream. Ultimately, such a foreclosure effect may require that firms seeking to enter one of the markets must enter both markets, significantly increasing the difficulty of entry.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2024 17:18
|
|
|
DarkHorse posted:No (if I understand the concept correctly) but you get to choose which ballot you want at time of voting. Then it counts as an open primary - an open primary is one where you can vote on the ballot of your choice without having to register in advance. Here's a ballotpedia article about it which lists Ohio we am open primary state: https://ballotpedia.org/Open_primary
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2024 23:33
|
|
|
Nucleic Acids posted:That AIPAC money spends good. I've thought for a long time now that the problem in American democracy isn't so much that people and corporations can basically give as much money as they can afford to a political campaign, but that the candidate who spends more money has a huge advantage - a lot of it driven by name recognition effects. It indicates that voters are really easily manipulated which causes problems far beyond campaigns chasing donor-bucks. Which is really what you expect when each vote has basically no chance to affect the outcome - you'd be irrational to spend any time researching candidates or figuring out who really represents your best interests. Maybe elections should be decided by randomly-selected juries of 100 people or less. Then they'd have an incentive to do some real research, to really think their votes through. Here the advantage of the not simply driven by the richer candidate having superior name recognition: quote:Among Democrats who say they know both Latimer and Bowman — 76% of the primary electorate– Latimer’s lead expands even further to 26 points (60% to 34%). What exactly is Latimer doing with the money that's giving him such an advantage? What are his ads about - the issues raised by the Post article (Israel/Palestine, Assata Shakur, fire alarm sanctity)? Is Latimer uniquely popular? Maybe the whole poll is BS which is the Bowman campaign's spin on it. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Apr 4, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2024 19:34
|
|
|
Kchama posted:I think in this case, the more likely culprit is that Jamaal Bowman's district was just redrawn and added in a presumably much more Jewish section of the city, and removed a portion perhaps more in line with Bowman. I scanned a couple articles about the redistricting and couldn't find anything to back your presumption - the redistricting impact seems to have been pretty marginal and overall preserved the demographic balance of the district. Where it might've hurt Bowman is that it swapped out a lot of Black voters in Wakefield who used to be in the district (and therefore had a relationship with Bowman as their congressman) for Black voters in co-op city who used to be in AOC's district (who have to be introduced/re-introduced to Bowman as their congressman). quote:Democrats gifted Bowman Co-Op City, a heavily Black-populated housing development in the Bronx with relatively high voter turnout. The move bolsters his chances against challenger Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who is backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Bowman, who represents a significant number of Jewish-American voters, has come under fire from AIPAC for voting against pro-Israel resolutions in the House. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Apr 4, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2024 21:20
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:
This isn't really a response to the post you're quoting. The post you're quoting is criticizing your claim that anyone who votes for Trump is "actively choosing the whole package." Hieronymous Alloy posted:He's a package deal tho. Anybody voting for, say, low inflation Trump, is at least fine with all the rest as the price for [low inflation]. Anyone voting for him is actively choosing the whole package. Pharmerboy is challenging you by saying, "if that's true, then anyone who votes for Biden is also choosing the whole package, including his increasingly controversial support for the state of Israel despite its well-documented crimes against humanity in Gaza." He (I'm assuming Pharmerboy is a boy) is challenging the idea that voters endorse/"choose" everything about a candidate. They might be making a totally different calculation, like "this one is the lesser of two evils - I'm not fine with him but I'd be even less fine with the other guy." I don't like putting words in someone else's mouth but I think Pharmerboy's implicit point here is that many people have made/will make exactly that calculation and voted/will vote Biden, and many people have made/will make exactly that calculation and vote Trump. And in neither case does it make sense to infer that they are "at least fine with" the sum of everything that candidate represents or will do. Your reply to Pharmerboy doesn't rebut that response at all - it's responding as if Pharmerboy had accused all Biden supporters of approving of Biden's Israel policy, when in fact Pharmerboy's precise point is that they don't. In fact it backs up Pharmerboy's point, because you respond by evaluating Biden in relation to Trump as the lesser of two evils. You're (logically) defending your (very reasonable) voting choice (or endorsement) not as an embrace of "the whole package" by itself but in comparison to the only other available package. And (I think) Pharmerboy's point is - yeah, a lot of Biden voters do that, and so do a lot of Trump voters, but we in our liberal bubble might not realize that Trump voters are doing it too. Put differently, when we see someone vote for Trump, we might make inferences about how they feel about Trump, and the intuitive inference there is that they like Trump on the whole. But the voting decision really only gives us information on how much they like Trump relative to Clinton/Biden - it's possible they're totally cognizant of Trump's flaws and believe he was/will be a disastrous POTUS, but they have the (mistaken) impression that Clinton/Biden is/would be even worse. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Apr 7, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2024 18:44
|
|
|
I think the history of the United States, of Germany, of Turkey, of Israel, of Japan, of a lot of countries over s long time - that history does indicate that it's pretty normal for a person to be complicit in crimes committed by their state, or enabled by their state - in what they do and don't do, in what they say and don't say. Because they've sincerely internalized the ideology that justifies the crimes or because they're scared of the consequences from speaking out. In this sense Joe Biden's actions toward Israel are deeply normal, and what a normal person would do, in the context of holding a political job where both the political system and public culture are deeply pro-Israel. He's going with the flow, doing what makes sense to keep his job and best satisfies the people and power around him, like a normal person. What's abnormal, unfortunately, is the moral insight and courage required to stand up and disagree with the people and power around you, and say "no this is wrong, our government needs to stop perpetrating/funding/defending crimes against humanity." Joe Biden's failure to demonstrate this insight or this courage might be the most normal thing about him. Ideally our representative democracy would choose leaders who are abnormally conscious and courageous but those exact traits tend to totally inhibit someone's capacity to get support from political machines. There's a reason the book "Ordinary Men" is about Holocaust perpetrators and not anti-Nazi dissidents. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Apr 7, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2024 20:36
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:I addressed that in an edit, or attempted to. This is true, and seems very obvious, but if we're trying to describe the reasoning process of the Trump voter, we have to keep in mind that there's a vast media landscape designed to make people believe the exact opposite, and it works. I've seen Trump voters say it: Trump is deeply imperfect, even a bad President, but at least he's not demented (as in, literally afflicted by dementia) in the way Biden is. So we gotta Vote Red No Matter Who. And if you really believe that - and billions of dollars are spent every year to make people believe it - then you might vote for Trump even though you think Trump will be a bad president. In fact I'm pretty sure that at least a million people will vote with that reasoning in 2024. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Apr 7, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2024 22:32
|
|
|
VikingofRock posted:I think that Christianity plays a much bigger part in shaping rural American politics than we usually give it credit for... I think these are generally examples of Christianity being shaped by the prevalent politics, like what happens with every religion, so I don't know how useful it is to say that Christianity is "shaping rural American politics." The Protestant work ethic, curse-of-Ham Christian racism, and pro-Trump Christianity all developed in reaction to a surge in demand for bourgeois/slavedriver/petty-bourgeois ideology - they're not any more intrinsic to the textual core of the religion than their polar opposites (anarchist Christianity, Black-liberation Christianity, Trump-is-antiChrist Christianity). Put Marxistly, they're just one slice of developments in the superstructure driven by changes in the base, just like we've seen plenty of bourgeois/racist/pro-Trump tendencies arise in the world of "secular" art or science. It's not a uniquely Christian phenomenon or even one where Christianity behaves very differently from other cultural identities/collective traditions. There's Zionist and anti-Zionist Judaism depending on the community's material relationship with the State of Israel, there's pacificist and pro-war Buddhism depending on whether the community is at peace or at war, there's nationalist and anti-nationalist Islam... etc. Religions are often pretty easy to contort into any way you want to answer modern economic or political questions because they're generally oriented around texts and traditions that originate from long before those questions were coherent, and even if not, they're highly open to interpretation. And it's not just religion either - does the popularity of the "Drapetomania" idea prove that psychological science had a powerful influence on the politics of the Antebellum South, or only that the politics of the Antebellum South had such a powerful influence on their local psychological-scientific output that the plantation class could commission bespoke diagnoses for class enemies? Basically I think you're mixing up cause and effect. Rural America isn't the way it is because "the sects that are very popular in rural America" are the way they are. The sects that are very popular in rural America are the way they are because rural America is the way it is: a political-economic landscape characterized by a coalition between bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, and White proletariat, and correspondingly its cultural output often celebrates wealth, work, and/or Whiteness. I do think you can draw a causal line between Paul of Tarsus' ideas about gender and sex and the extent of modern American homophobia, but even then, anyone who spends too much time online today knows about the rise of a sort of secular homophobia/transphobia so it's not as simple as "Christian/religious influence is why we have to deal with it." Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Apr 8, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2024 23:21
|
|
|
There were a few times in 2015/16 that Trump made modest efforts to depict himself as a sort of Log Cabin Republican but then he became a normal homo/trans-phobic Republican by the time he entered office.quote:President Donald Trump said he would be different — the first Republican president to embrace LGBTQ people. He said the key acronym (“L, G, B, T … Q”) at the 2016 Republican convention. He held up a pride flag at a campaign event. He initially defended the right of Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender woman, to use the bathroom that aligns with her gender identity. He tweeted, “Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.” I wonder if that reflects genuine ideological drift (he became more homo/trans-phobic as he surrounded himself with Republicans) or if it was a calculation that normal Republicans are more electable than Log Cabin republicans. Probably a mixture of both. Honestly it feels like he/the GOP started going much harder after gay and trans people after their efforts to villify Muslims as internal enemies fizzled out. Maybe because constitutionally it's easier to go after gay/trans people than Muslims, maybe because people don't really worry about their kids converting to Islam but a lot of people do worry about their kids coming out as gay/trans. Maybe it's that in the years leading up to 2016 there actually were sporadic incidents where some wackjob got hooked on radical Islam and killed people in the US, and that hasn't happened for a while. Maybe it's just like in 1984 where they have to find a new enemy every couple years or the hate goes stale. But there was a time that the Trump-GOP message was "we alone will defend gays from Muslims" and now it's more commonly the opposite. quote:Twelve years ago, House Republicans questioned whether the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was a “terrorist organization.” Last week, CAIR was on site at the board meeting, lobbying for a policy that would let Muslim students skip the LGBTQ reading, to fix what Maryland CAIR director Zainab Chaudry called the “growing sense of hurt and betrayal experienced by our communities.” But not completely the opposite - Trump is still pushing the Muslim ban. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Apr 8, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2024 01:48
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:That's insane chain of reasoning ("because some people lie about X, all instances of people saying X are lies"), but you do you. I don't actually have a horse in this fight. That's not what the user said. The user said "because people often lie about X, someone saying X is not evidence that X is true." That's a very sound chain of reasoning. There's obvious reason to suspect foul play because this giant corporation probably benefits from his death. But "he said he wasn't suicidal, that's evidence that he wasn't" is kinda naive about how suicidal people behave. And you'd think if Boeing was gonna go this route then they'd figure out how to do it before the deposition even started, but I don't know that world. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Apr 10, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2024 17:04
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:1) Good thing we're explicitly talking about whether or not there's evidence at all, not the relative strength. Explicitly. Scroll up and read. No the post you were quoting is talking about "compelling evidence." That's what you called poor logic. But not really, because you wrote your own stupidly exaggerated paraphrasal of it, changing "not compelling evidence" into "always a lie", and called that poor logic. I agree the dumb idea you described is poor logic, but it's not something anyone said. quote:2) No, it's not a sound chain of reasoning. Please try again. Logic has rules and you are breaking them. Which rules? I think it's pretty intuitive, and logical: you can't trust someone when they say they're not suicidal, because suicidal people often try to disguise that they're suicidal for a number of reasons: because they fear they'll be stopped, because of social stigma, or even because of economic incentives to die in a way other than suicide. This man's death should be investigated for potential murder for obvious reasons. Boeing and its most invested shareholders should be held in suspicion. And either way, Boeing should be torn apart and reconstituted as a trustworthy manufacturer. But separately, we should be aware that just because someone says they're not suicidal, it doesn't mean they're not at risk - it's not even "compelling evidence" that they're not at risk. If we mistakenly believe otherwise, we might make the deadly mistake of neglecting someone who's at risk. We're on the same page about this guy's death being suspicious as hell but "he said he wasn't gonna kill himself, and that's compelling evidence that he didn't kill himself" reinforces really dangerous myths about suicide and its warning signs. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Apr 10, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2024 17:27
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:"Intuitive" and "logical" are not even a little bit synonymous. They are in fact very frequently at odds with each other. That's why I said "intuitive and logical": if they were synonyms I would've just said one of the two! This is a case where we're discussing reasoning which is both intuitive AND logical. That makes the logic easier to follow, when it roughly corresponds to human intuition. quote:No matter how many times people lie about a thing, it doesn't increase the chances that other people are lying about it. Again, "all X is a lie" is a strange hyperbole that you projected onto the original post you were criticizing. The post you're criticizing said "this claim is not compelling evidence that the man was not suicidal." Not "everybody who says they're not suicidal - all of them actually are!" quote:You a person in the world might be more likely to distrust people's ages/weights, but the lying doesn't make people older/younger or lighter/heavier. If we're discussing John's self-reported weight, that Bill lied isn't relevant. If we're discussing John's self-reported weight, and we're not sure whether to trust John, it is logical to ask whether self-reported weights are generally reliable. It's possible John is lying when most people tell the truth, or vice versa, but the general reliability of similar reports really is useful to get a better estimate of how much we can trust that specific figure. Because while we don't know John, we can make the assumption that he generally follows patterns of behavior demonstrated by other people, and if we trust that assumption, we'll get a more precise estimate of how much we can trust him (and maybe a more precise estimate of his weight). quote:Also, please take an actual logic class. Not you, specifically, Civilized Fishbot, just kind of everyone. I actually did take logic classes in college, a lot of math majors did even though they were in the philosophy department. The philosophy students didn't like us and didn't like our effect on the grading curve. We didn't like the philosophy students and we thought the building was a shithole. All of us were correct, and I'd love to take another logic class. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Apr 10, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2024 18:21
|
|
|
Charliegrs posted:Didn't the Boring whistleblower tell someone (his wife?) that if he dies it's not suicide? Not so much "I won't commit suicide"? I don't think there's a meaningful difference here. Both are plausible in the context of "I believe the Boeing corporation is going to kill me" and both are plausible in the context of "I am suicidal but I would like not to be remembered as a suicide victim." If I thought a corporation might plausibly send someone to kill me and stage it as a suicide, I probably wouldn't hang out in my car by myself, but I've never been in that situation.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2024 22:02
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 15:43 |
|
|
Zapp Brannigan posted:The party that holds the White House by tradition holds their convention last. Which surprises me that the MAGA RNC hasn't changed theirs just to buck tradition. I think the dynamic here is that the incumbent party wants the later convention so that they have more momentum going into the final stretch of the campaign (conventions produce a polling boost) and the non-incumbent party needs an earlier convention because the convention is an essential part of unifying the party around the nominee.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2024 23:48
|
|