While I don't doubt that postmodernism has influenced the idea you're talking about, its time as the ideology of the intellectual elite has come and gone. Those people nowadays who deny the existence of merit are followers of the religion of intersectionality, which is also where you're most likely to hear that "oppressor" language these days. (Postmodernists axiomatically deny the existence of all objective truth, while intersectional feminists implicitly assume there are certain truths about the world that can be known—theirs.)
California's not like the rest of the West. From Sacramento on down there's a lot more developed here than in any of the states on the other side of the Sierras. And a lot of the land that is sparsely populated in California is just straight-up mountains. The flatter parts in between are pretty packed in by American standards, hence the awful traffic even in lots of spots outside the city centers. (And I'm saying this living in one of the less populated regions of the state, which is nowhere near the proposed HSR.)
But just how much cheaper is limited-access highway compared to high-speed rail? Feel free to include the savings in land acquisition costs given how much narrower freeways are than railroads.
And heck, why not factor in maintenance costs as well, I'm sure that'll make your numbers look even better!
I would be happy to enforce the reasonable laws against the asshole cyclists who make things difficult for everyone, including other people on bike. But first we have to agree upon which laws make sense to require cyclists to follow.
Personally, I would be fine with the only changes being to legalize the Idaho stop (treat stop signs like yield signs and red lights like four-way stops), change how fault is assigned in cyclist-motorist collisions to default to the motorist, mandate 3 feet of passing space, and do something to penalize motorists who try to interfere with cyclists' attempts to take the lane. Then I think it would be totally fair to crack down on all the other violations, put points on their drivers' licenses for biking infractions, impound bikes of repeat offenders, etc.
Keep in mind that those things you call "obstructions" not only make it easier for law-abiding folks to ride bikes safely, they also make it easier to tell who's trying to follow the law and who deserves to be penalized. More often than not, they make things safer for drivers at the same time.
Hey now, I'm not saying I'm one of those idiots who blows through stop signs. I'm just saying that in most cars, your field of vision is blocked in a number of places and you need to take a moment at a full stop to look around you before proceeding. If you do that while moving, it screws with your perception. The difference between 2 and 5 and 10 mph is a lot more subtle in a car than on a bike.
On a bike there are no support columns in your way, no blind spots, and absolutely no difference between craning your neck around while very slowly drifting forward versus doing so with your feet on the ground. You can tell if traffic is clear or not just as well either way. (I'm talking about quiet residential streets here, not places where there's usually cross traffic!) If it were equally convenient to stop completely, maybe no one would care, but since it is a lot easier to accelerate from even a very low speed than from a full stop, it becomes really obvious that the latter doesn't do a damn thing for safety once you force yourself to do it a few dozen times, in spite of the inconvenience, and make the comparison.
After 20+ years of biking on roads, and 15 years of driving, the only accident of any sort I've been involved in was when I was young and stupid, biked on the sidewalk where there wasn't room to bike in the road, and T-boned another cyclist at low speed when he came out of an alley. No near misses, either, though I've had to shout "Watch out!" to zombie drivers who don't check their mirrors more times than I can count. So anecdotally, at least, I can say this approach works!
In a reasonable world, we would change the laws to allow people on bikes to yield at stop signs and go at red lights after a full stop, as they already do anyway, so as to not artificially slow them down while making their behavior more predictable for pedestrians and motorists. But instead we moralize and say that if I can't legally plow through four-way stops in my car, no one can! Even though four-way stops were engineered deliberately to slow down cars in residential neighborhoods for the benefit of other road users.
Signed, an enthusiastic driver who also enjoys riding a bike, who follows the road laws exactly when in a car and bends them while on a bike, because I'm concerned about actual safety and not just arbitrarily following rules.
I think what you're seeing is a lot of Americans uncomfortable with the realization that because corporate action on this front cannot be directly controlled, the most obvious solutions to this problem involve a much greater deal of government intervention and interference with the free market. Curiously, this is not so far off from what you anticipate as a result of corporate censorship of the Internet.
Rather than hash out how we're going to get out of this dilemma, though—perhaps working through which scenarios are most plausible and which of our freedoms will be impacted most—you find a lot of people reluctant to talk about it. Because there's a reluctance to start a conversation in which a plausible conclusion might be that massive government intervention would be a good thing, or that censorship isn't so bad, or that monopolies are benign as long as we trust our limited government, or that the free market is the source of a problem even in the absence of significant externalities. We're too afraid of upending our assumptions to go to extremes, any extremes, on the right or the left, and thus we're stuck with mediocrity.
Take a look at any recent history of capitalism or post-1500s global trade and you'll see that they developed and spread in tandem. If anything, global trade on the part of European colonial powers created and maintained capitalism as we know it, meaning that anything that you consider a key distinction between capitalism and feudalism (or socialism or whatever) is inextricably tied to and dependent on globalization. Or to put it more simply (albeit admittedly while being a bit reductionist), if it weren't for the British Empire, we wouldn't all be working by the rules of British capitalism.
When you're trying to hire from a pool of workers in short supply, you might have to concede to some of their strongest demands. High-paid, highly educated, young workers in the US are disproportionately more likely to want to live in urban environments.
Exactly the problem we've already identified, these workers have demands, extortion.
God forbid the workers have demands! What they're demanding is good for society. What you want to do to save money, I think is bad for us all. God bless the workers who push the companies to go against the undemanding cogs who knuckle under.
If you really believed that, you'd not object to Amazon setting up cloning labs to produce the perfect worker.
Complete absurdity.
The only question is why is Amazon going along with it.
Because they're doing their part to dismantle the suburbs bit by bit, just like the young moneyed classes want them to. They have a vision, and personally I think it's beautiful.
My guess would be that they assumed that Seattle would remain sprawly and low-rise, and that any outsiders who wanted to invest in the local economy by building taller buildings would cower in shame and abandon their plans when the population of the city passive-aggressively refused en masse to recognize said buildings as being reflective of the real Seattle, the gritty, honest, unpretentious city that we grew up in, not that you would know anything about that.
Then get new employees. Ones who don't demand you spend more on building space while still paying them a high salary.
When you're trying to hire from a pool of workers in short supply, you might have to concede to some of their strongest demands. High-paid, highly educated, young workers in the US are disproportionately more likely to want to live in urban environments.
I realize that that's not for everyone, but for some people it really is a huge factor in making a job desirable. And if these workers are in a position to pick and choose among employers, why shouldn't they get to push for corporate urbanization? It's not as if that's a decision that has negative external impacts compared to the alternatives: It reduces transportation mileage and the resulting energy usage and environmental damage, reduces further development on green space, reduces the need for expensive-to-maintain suburban infrastructure, revitalizes shitty urban neighborhoods, allows for a more cost-effective concentration of government services, and so forth. It can even encourage greater human contact and community building in theory, though my experience with Amazon employees in this regard has been negative. Really the only objective negative is that it costs more, but don't companies have the right to spend money as they see fit to strengthen their future earning potential?
I would add in a penchant for denying reality — can anyone in their right mind say that doing the commute across the I-90 bridge is in any way pleasant? And yet people seemed (when I was living there a year ago) to tolerate the way the traffic on it would clog up seemingly at random, or become predictably abysmal before a Seahawks game, and render the buses immobile as well. The bicycle infrastructure is mediocre, too. Is it just low expectations, or a refusal to believe that the Seattle mindset about growth and development would have serious consequences, or what?
I've lived in about a dozen cities in the US, and Seattle is by far the weirdest about squaring how ideal they think they are with the actual situation on the ground. What makes it particularly incomprehensible is that they are doing a lot of things right, yet there's a weird collective defensiveness about criticism of the Seattle Way. Or, really, about outside input on anything. You're supposed to think they're doing everything perfectly, yet as an "outsider" you're not supposed to want to join them in celebrating their supposed perfection and moving there. I don't get it.
Also, it's pretty rich that you fault me for saying the OP should be modded down, but say nothing about his wanting to "physically wound" people who dare to disagree with his politics.
No, people who disagree with me should get modded up when they actually articulate the basis for their viewpoints in a coherent manner, respect the validity of other rational opinions, and treat their opponents with civility, because that's what makes Slashdot worth reading. And really, that's just common human decency for anyone with an active mind. I'm not a hypocrite like the person you're describing — why is that the first place your mind went?
The world must be a difficult place for you, always getting violent urges toward people who don't share your opinions and using words like "antiwhites" that undoubtedly would get you branded a foaming-at-the-mouth racist if you used them around the general public. Especially when fewer and fewer people believe in your essentialist, pseudoscientific worldview on race (hint: race and gender are not remotely the same kinds of categories) and you don't even try to make a case for yourself. You seem to be paranoid, too — how are all these supposed "antiwhites" making your life as a white person so difficult?
If these are such obvious facts, then why do so many biologists, historians, etc. disagree with your assumptions, not to mention vast swathes of the general public who reject your backward categorization scheme? The concept of race has a pretty short history, which you seem to be oblivious to. Do you even know how the position opposite yours is argued or do you just live in a vacuum where no one ever tells you you're full of shit, no different than creationists or anti-vaxxers?
Also, who the hell is modding up posts that sound like they wouldn't be out of place on Stormfront?
If one ethnicity who wields power can be biased, then so can another.
You're absolutely right. That's why in the context of the United States, what's significant is that there has existed a successful system of white supremacy, while no other race has been able to systematically wield that same kind of power over whites. Where there has existed limited favoritism toward nonwhites (e.g., affirmative action), it has been enacted with the consent of certain groups of powerful whites (liberals who thought such policies would make their power and wealth morally justifiable, as I see it). Black Power, La Raza, and the like haven't had any success of that sort. Thus it's nonsensical to talk about black or Latino supremacy in the US, and so your assertion is irrelevant in this context.
It's a lot of bullshit.
You have to be deliberately ignorant to not understand that.
Does this mean something other than "I'm right and you're not, so I don't have to prove myself"? What is it that magically makes your views so much more inherently correct than those that you supposedly heard in college? How about the bullshit part — can I call your ideas bullshit and be automatically right?
That's because the US has a history of white supremacy, an ideology that was widespread among whites of all social strata and systematically applied by those in power to materially disadvantage blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, and nonwhite immigrants from anywhere else. While much of its legal force was scrapped in the '60s and most explicit expressions of white supremacy have since become socially unacceptable, a lot of Americans, especially white ones, still have a way of thinking about race that has been strongly influenced by this legacy, if not necessarily explicitly white supremacist. It's not as if that ideology just faded away once the Civil Rights Act was passed.
There are probably plenty of black people out there who overstate impact of this enduring mentality on jury partiality, but there is certainly some grounding for believing that many whites remain uniquely biased against certain other ethnic groups, African-Americans in particular. The idea that there's some kind of corresponding Mexican or Latino supremacy that has led to similar power dynamics in the US, on the other hand, is not one based in reality. That's one major inconsistency!
No, the human nature is not flawed; the system is.
Leave human nature alone, there is nothing wrong with it!
That doesn't sound like Evtim's suggesting that we need to change human nature, as you put it. So let's go back to the line you're probably thinking of:
Time after time we have seen that human nature is highly adaptable
If we try to analyze this line in the context of the other two, the only meaning that we can sensibly derive is that capacity for change is part of human nature itself — it is only our sclerotic ideological system that, like all other systems, denies individual agency for change. Look at people who don't benefit from our systems or who grew up on the margins of them, and see a remarkable plasticity regardless of whatever little else they may have in common, even if they often use that flexibility to thoroughly fuck themselves over.
Obviously this is not a Marxist idea. Communists, as I'm sure you well know, produced a system that was remarkable in its denial of individual ability (and desire!) to escape societal determinism, above and beyond even all the other rigid dogmas of its day.
...except you don't "need" the single most expensive option.
Who's suggesting that? The GP is suggesting that the smartphone is in fact the cheapest way to do what the poor are trying to do. And if I may make an assumption, he/she is thinking primarily of the urban poor, who tend to have less housing stability (but more relative mobility) than the rural poor, to generalize broadly.
If you don't then you shouldn't get any sympathy from bleeding hearts with no clue.
No clue about what? Why is a landline internet connection more important for someone making minimum wage at, most likely, multiple part-time jobs? Why is it more important for them to have a wired internet device than to have a low-end smartphone?
The part about sympathy is particularly weird. I can have sympathy for people who are too ignorant to make smart life decisions without validating their decisions. Being stuck in that way of life sucks, especially when part of the problem is that you're held down by self-imposed limitations.
This stupid shit is how people don't have money for unexpected emergencies.
Are you saying this is the main reason, or a substantial contributory reason? In either case — got data to back that up? Sociologists have been studying the poor for quite some time now, and from what I know of those studies, the conclusions have been quite different.
Because politics is complicated, and people who want to make it simple generally either are ignorant or have an agenda (or both).
Half of what is said in politics is already essentially "fuck you" to the other side. Saying it explicitly doesn't add to the conversation. To make this something of substance, you would have to say something like "Mexico can go fuck themselves because the US ought to protect its border in this particular waybecause..."
Honestly, though, I have never heard the phrase that completes that sentence. Putting it in terms of rights rather than opinions about the best course of action obfuscates things, too. Of course we have the right to build a wall. We also have the right to make review of your Facebook profile part of the official visa application process, or to require that all Mexicans who enter the country wear sombreros. You might object and say that I'm talking about a God-given right to do something that's utterly pointless and ridiculous, but my point here is that many people against Trump's border policies think the exact same thing about the fucking wall. You can argue against it entirely in the realm of Realpolitik, without even talking about messages it might send to the Mexican people or whatever, because soft power is such a vital component to national security these days. Sending such a big, visible fuck you to your neighbor is likely to have material consequences.
So it's pointless to talk about what we have the right to do without evaluating the likely outcomes and weighing the positives and negatives. But that entails admitting that even the most brilliant and powerful leaders can't come up with plans that don't have drawbacks, and that seems to go against Trump's narrative of what strong leadership looks like.
Spitefully cutting off aid we choose to give to help poor people is not the same as getting their government to pay for something it doesn't want to pay for. If you think we should be less charitable with our foreign aid, then just say so, but it's completely disingenuous to try to use the poor as a political pawn to coerce a foreign government into doing what you want it to do. Besides, if there's anything we've learned from the 20th century, it's that trying to coerce other countries into doing things they don't want to do, without making sure there's something in it for them, tends to blow up in your face. Sometimes quite literally.
Reduce welfare given to illegals from Mexico and wall is paid for sooner.
How much is that?
Mexico can go fuck themselves if they think the US protecting its own border is a bad thing.
Does that mean something other than "I'm right because I say so"?
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't doubt that postmodernism has influenced the idea you're talking about, its time as the ideology of the intellectual elite has come and gone. Those people nowadays who deny the existence of merit are followers of the religion of intersectionality, which is also where you're most likely to hear that "oppressor" language these days. (Postmodernists axiomatically deny the existence of all objective truth, while intersectional feminists implicitly assume there are certain truths about the world that can be known—theirs.)
California's not like the rest of the West. From Sacramento on down there's a lot more developed here than in any of the states on the other side of the Sierras. And a lot of the land that is sparsely populated in California is just straight-up mountains. The flatter parts in between are pretty packed in by American standards, hence the awful traffic even in lots of spots outside the city centers. (And I'm saying this living in one of the less populated regions of the state, which is nowhere near the proposed HSR.)
But just how much cheaper is limited-access highway compared to high-speed rail? Feel free to include the savings in land acquisition costs given how much narrower freeways are than railroads.
And heck, why not factor in maintenance costs as well, I'm sure that'll make your numbers look even better!
Let me guess, you're not a teacher?
I would be happy to enforce the reasonable laws against the asshole cyclists who make things difficult for everyone, including other people on bike. But first we have to agree upon which laws make sense to require cyclists to follow.
Personally, I would be fine with the only changes being to legalize the Idaho stop (treat stop signs like yield signs and red lights like four-way stops), change how fault is assigned in cyclist-motorist collisions to default to the motorist, mandate 3 feet of passing space, and do something to penalize motorists who try to interfere with cyclists' attempts to take the lane. Then I think it would be totally fair to crack down on all the other violations, put points on their drivers' licenses for biking infractions, impound bikes of repeat offenders, etc.
Keep in mind that those things you call "obstructions" not only make it easier for law-abiding folks to ride bikes safely, they also make it easier to tell who's trying to follow the law and who deserves to be penalized. More often than not, they make things safer for drivers at the same time.
Hey now, I'm not saying I'm one of those idiots who blows through stop signs. I'm just saying that in most cars, your field of vision is blocked in a number of places and you need to take a moment at a full stop to look around you before proceeding. If you do that while moving, it screws with your perception. The difference between 2 and 5 and 10 mph is a lot more subtle in a car than on a bike.
On a bike there are no support columns in your way, no blind spots, and absolutely no difference between craning your neck around while very slowly drifting forward versus doing so with your feet on the ground. You can tell if traffic is clear or not just as well either way. (I'm talking about quiet residential streets here, not places where there's usually cross traffic!) If it were equally convenient to stop completely, maybe no one would care, but since it is a lot easier to accelerate from even a very low speed than from a full stop, it becomes really obvious that the latter doesn't do a damn thing for safety once you force yourself to do it a few dozen times, in spite of the inconvenience, and make the comparison.
After 20+ years of biking on roads, and 15 years of driving, the only accident of any sort I've been involved in was when I was young and stupid, biked on the sidewalk where there wasn't room to bike in the road, and T-boned another cyclist at low speed when he came out of an alley. No near misses, either, though I've had to shout "Watch out!" to zombie drivers who don't check their mirrors more times than I can count. So anecdotally, at least, I can say this approach works!
In a reasonable world, we would change the laws to allow people on bikes to yield at stop signs and go at red lights after a full stop, as they already do anyway, so as to not artificially slow them down while making their behavior more predictable for pedestrians and motorists. But instead we moralize and say that if I can't legally plow through four-way stops in my car, no one can! Even though four-way stops were engineered deliberately to slow down cars in residential neighborhoods for the benefit of other road users.
Signed, an enthusiastic driver who also enjoys riding a bike, who follows the road laws exactly when in a car and bends them while on a bike, because I'm concerned about actual safety and not just arbitrarily following rules.
You're talking about Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, not all of NYC. The main issue in the Bronx is not that it's too expensive.
I think what you're seeing is a lot of Americans uncomfortable with the realization that because corporate action on this front cannot be directly controlled, the most obvious solutions to this problem involve a much greater deal of government intervention and interference with the free market. Curiously, this is not so far off from what you anticipate as a result of corporate censorship of the Internet.
Rather than hash out how we're going to get out of this dilemma, though—perhaps working through which scenarios are most plausible and which of our freedoms will be impacted most—you find a lot of people reluctant to talk about it. Because there's a reluctance to start a conversation in which a plausible conclusion might be that massive government intervention would be a good thing, or that censorship isn't so bad, or that monopolies are benign as long as we trust our limited government, or that the free market is the source of a problem even in the absence of significant externalities. We're too afraid of upending our assumptions to go to extremes, any extremes, on the right or the left, and thus we're stuck with mediocrity.
Way to conflate Globalization and Capitalism.
Take a look at any recent history of capitalism or post-1500s global trade and you'll see that they developed and spread in tandem. If anything, global trade on the part of European colonial powers created and maintained capitalism as we know it, meaning that anything that you consider a key distinction between capitalism and feudalism (or socialism or whatever) is inextricably tied to and dependent on globalization. Or to put it more simply (albeit admittedly while being a bit reductionist), if it weren't for the British Empire, we wouldn't all be working by the rules of British capitalism.
[citation needed]
When you're trying to hire from a pool of workers in short supply, you might have to concede to some of their strongest demands. High-paid, highly educated, young workers in the US are disproportionately more likely to want to live in urban environments.
Exactly the problem we've already identified, these workers have demands, extortion.
God forbid the workers have demands! What they're demanding is good for society. What you want to do to save money, I think is bad for us all. God bless the workers who push the companies to go against the undemanding cogs who knuckle under.
If you really believed that, you'd not object to Amazon setting up cloning labs to produce the perfect worker.
Complete absurdity.
The only question is why is Amazon going along with it.
Because they're doing their part to dismantle the suburbs bit by bit, just like the young moneyed classes want them to. They have a vision, and personally I think it's beautiful.
My guess would be that they assumed that Seattle would remain sprawly and low-rise, and that any outsiders who wanted to invest in the local economy by building taller buildings would cower in shame and abandon their plans when the population of the city passive-aggressively refused en masse to recognize said buildings as being reflective of the real Seattle, the gritty, honest, unpretentious city that we grew up in, not that you would know anything about that.
Then get new employees. Ones who don't demand you spend more on building space while still paying them a high salary.
When you're trying to hire from a pool of workers in short supply, you might have to concede to some of their strongest demands. High-paid, highly educated, young workers in the US are disproportionately more likely to want to live in urban environments.
I realize that that's not for everyone, but for some people it really is a huge factor in making a job desirable. And if these workers are in a position to pick and choose among employers, why shouldn't they get to push for corporate urbanization? It's not as if that's a decision that has negative external impacts compared to the alternatives: It reduces transportation mileage and the resulting energy usage and environmental damage, reduces further development on green space, reduces the need for expensive-to-maintain suburban infrastructure, revitalizes shitty urban neighborhoods, allows for a more cost-effective concentration of government services, and so forth. It can even encourage greater human contact and community building in theory, though my experience with Amazon employees in this regard has been negative. Really the only objective negative is that it costs more, but don't companies have the right to spend money as they see fit to strengthen their future earning potential?
I would add in a penchant for denying reality — can anyone in their right mind say that doing the commute across the I-90 bridge is in any way pleasant? And yet people seemed (when I was living there a year ago) to tolerate the way the traffic on it would clog up seemingly at random, or become predictably abysmal before a Seahawks game, and render the buses immobile as well. The bicycle infrastructure is mediocre, too. Is it just low expectations, or a refusal to believe that the Seattle mindset about growth and development would have serious consequences, or what?
I've lived in about a dozen cities in the US, and Seattle is by far the weirdest about squaring how ideal they think they are with the actual situation on the ground. What makes it particularly incomprehensible is that they are doing a lot of things right, yet there's a weird collective defensiveness about criticism of the Seattle Way. Or, really, about outside input on anything. You're supposed to think they're doing everything perfectly, yet as an "outsider" you're not supposed to want to join them in celebrating their supposed perfection and moving there. I don't get it.
Also, it's pretty rich that you fault me for saying the OP should be modded down, but say nothing about his wanting to "physically wound" people who dare to disagree with his politics.
No, people who disagree with me should get modded up when they actually articulate the basis for their viewpoints in a coherent manner, respect the validity of other rational opinions, and treat their opponents with civility, because that's what makes Slashdot worth reading. And really, that's just common human decency for anyone with an active mind. I'm not a hypocrite like the person you're describing — why is that the first place your mind went?
The world must be a difficult place for you, always getting violent urges toward people who don't share your opinions and using words like "antiwhites" that undoubtedly would get you branded a foaming-at-the-mouth racist if you used them around the general public. Especially when fewer and fewer people believe in your essentialist, pseudoscientific worldview on race (hint: race and gender are not remotely the same kinds of categories) and you don't even try to make a case for yourself. You seem to be paranoid, too — how are all these supposed "antiwhites" making your life as a white person so difficult?
If these are such obvious facts, then why do so many biologists, historians, etc. disagree with your assumptions, not to mention vast swathes of the general public who reject your backward categorization scheme? The concept of race has a pretty short history, which you seem to be oblivious to. Do you even know how the position opposite yours is argued or do you just live in a vacuum where no one ever tells you you're full of shit, no different than creationists or anti-vaxxers?
Also, who the hell is modding up posts that sound like they wouldn't be out of place on Stormfront?
If one ethnicity who wields power can be biased, then so can another.
You're absolutely right. That's why in the context of the United States, what's significant is that there has existed a successful system of white supremacy, while no other race has been able to systematically wield that same kind of power over whites. Where there has existed limited favoritism toward nonwhites (e.g., affirmative action), it has been enacted with the consent of certain groups of powerful whites (liberals who thought such policies would make their power and wealth morally justifiable, as I see it). Black Power, La Raza, and the like haven't had any success of that sort. Thus it's nonsensical to talk about black or Latino supremacy in the US, and so your assertion is irrelevant in this context.
It's a lot of bullshit.
You have to be deliberately ignorant to not understand that.
Does this mean something other than "I'm right and you're not, so I don't have to prove myself"? What is it that magically makes your views so much more inherently correct than those that you supposedly heard in college? How about the bullshit part — can I call your ideas bullshit and be automatically right?
That's because the US has a history of white supremacy, an ideology that was widespread among whites of all social strata and systematically applied by those in power to materially disadvantage blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, and nonwhite immigrants from anywhere else. While much of its legal force was scrapped in the '60s and most explicit expressions of white supremacy have since become socially unacceptable, a lot of Americans, especially white ones, still have a way of thinking about race that has been strongly influenced by this legacy, if not necessarily explicitly white supremacist. It's not as if that ideology just faded away once the Civil Rights Act was passed.
There are probably plenty of black people out there who overstate impact of this enduring mentality on jury partiality, but there is certainly some grounding for believing that many whites remain uniquely biased against certain other ethnic groups, African-Americans in particular. The idea that there's some kind of corresponding Mexican or Latino supremacy that has led to similar power dynamics in the US, on the other hand, is not one based in reality. That's one major inconsistency!
ALL OF THEM ARE CORRUPT because THE PEOPLE RUNNING THEM ARE CORRUPT, BY NATURE.
Romans 5:12, amirite?
Stretch your mind a little...
No, the human nature is not flawed; the system is.
Leave human nature alone, there is nothing wrong with it!
That doesn't sound like Evtim's suggesting that we need to change human nature, as you put it. So let's go back to the line you're probably thinking of:
Time after time we have seen that human nature is highly adaptable
If we try to analyze this line in the context of the other two, the only meaning that we can sensibly derive is that capacity for change is part of human nature itself — it is only our sclerotic ideological system that, like all other systems, denies individual agency for change. Look at people who don't benefit from our systems or who grew up on the margins of them, and see a remarkable plasticity regardless of whatever little else they may have in common, even if they often use that flexibility to thoroughly fuck themselves over.
Obviously this is not a Marxist idea. Communists, as I'm sure you well know, produced a system that was remarkable in its denial of individual ability (and desire!) to escape societal determinism, above and beyond even all the other rigid dogmas of its day.
...except you don't "need" the single most expensive option.
Who's suggesting that? The GP is suggesting that the smartphone is in fact the cheapest way to do what the poor are trying to do. And if I may make an assumption, he/she is thinking primarily of the urban poor, who tend to have less housing stability (but more relative mobility) than the rural poor, to generalize broadly.
If you don't then you shouldn't get any sympathy from bleeding hearts with no clue.
No clue about what? Why is a landline internet connection more important for someone making minimum wage at, most likely, multiple part-time jobs? Why is it more important for them to have a wired internet device than to have a low-end smartphone?
The part about sympathy is particularly weird. I can have sympathy for people who are too ignorant to make smart life decisions without validating their decisions. Being stuck in that way of life sucks, especially when part of the problem is that you're held down by self-imposed limitations.
This stupid shit is how people don't have money for unexpected emergencies.
Are you saying this is the main reason, or a substantial contributory reason? In either case — got data to back that up? Sociologists have been studying the poor for quite some time now, and from what I know of those studies, the conclusions have been quite different.
Why do you insist on making it complicated?
Because politics is complicated, and people who want to make it simple generally either are ignorant or have an agenda (or both).
Half of what is said in politics is already essentially "fuck you" to the other side. Saying it explicitly doesn't add to the conversation. To make this something of substance, you would have to say something like "Mexico can go fuck themselves because the US ought to protect its border in this particular way because ..."
Honestly, though, I have never heard the phrase that completes that sentence. Putting it in terms of rights rather than opinions about the best course of action obfuscates things, too. Of course we have the right to build a wall. We also have the right to make review of your Facebook profile part of the official visa application process, or to require that all Mexicans who enter the country wear sombreros. You might object and say that I'm talking about a God-given right to do something that's utterly pointless and ridiculous, but my point here is that many people against Trump's border policies think the exact same thing about the fucking wall. You can argue against it entirely in the realm of Realpolitik, without even talking about messages it might send to the Mexican people or whatever, because soft power is such a vital component to national security these days. Sending such a big, visible fuck you to your neighbor is likely to have material consequences.
So it's pointless to talk about what we have the right to do without evaluating the likely outcomes and weighing the positives and negatives. But that entails admitting that even the most brilliant and powerful leaders can't come up with plans that don't have drawbacks, and that seems to go against Trump's narrative of what strong leadership looks like.
Spitefully cutting off aid we choose to give to help poor people is not the same as getting their government to pay for something it doesn't want to pay for. If you think we should be less charitable with our foreign aid, then just say so, but it's completely disingenuous to try to use the poor as a political pawn to coerce a foreign government into doing what you want it to do. Besides, if there's anything we've learned from the 20th century, it's that trying to coerce other countries into doing things they don't want to do, without making sure there's something in it for them, tends to blow up in your face. Sometimes quite literally.
Reduce welfare given to illegals from Mexico and wall is paid for sooner.
How much is that?
Mexico can go fuck themselves if they think the US protecting its own border is a bad thing.
Does that mean something other than "I'm right because I say so"?