"First thing" is an idiom. It doesn't mean the literal first thing. I'd have preferred him to have done it even faster, but the majority were out within 18 months of his taking office. Of all the things you could pick to complain about in his presidency, this one seems pretty damn minor.
But all of that is irrelevant, because that's not what this entire thread of discussion was over. We were discussing cpu's assertion that Obama said "If our troops are not out of Iraq and Afghanistan by the time I take office, I will bring them home my first year. You can bank on it!" That claim has been shown to be doubly a lie. Firstly, he wasn't referring to Afghanistan, only Iraq. Secondly, he did not give a timeline, just an idiomatic assertion that he'd get it done soon.
Yes, class action lawsuits don't help the victims. Neither does putting murderers in jail. But the goal is to give people and businesses a reason to think twice before committing a despicable act. Thanks to SCOTUS's decision that companies can stick a "you can't sue us!" clause in any and all contracts, there is now no mechanism by which companies can be made to pay for abusing their customers. Day-dreaming about alternate mechanisms is pointless. This is the one that we have (or had, at any rate), and for all its flaws, it did work. Companies that abused people were made to pay. But no longer.
He was referring to the troops in Iraq during that speech. If you hadn't found a version that had been selectively edited by a YouTube user named "PresidentChimp", you might know that.
He was consistent through his campaign that he opposed the Iraq War and supported the Afghanistan War. You might disagree with that stance, but don't lie about what he said.
Obama is anti deficit spending. He has come out publicly in favor of making multi-millionaires and billionaires pay at least the tax rates of their secretaries and taxing corporations that outsource jobs rather than those that keep jobs in the U.S.
That much is true, but he hasn't done squat to control spending.
Wrong. Obama has been very tight on spending. Check out the historical record.
Discretionary spending during Obama's first two terms (the only years with finalized data) averaged 9.1% of the GDP. Under Reagan, the average was 9.9%. The only reason Obama's spending seems high is because of the mandatory spending categories like Social Security and unemployment benefits. Those go up when we're in recession, for obvious reasons, and it would take a major act of Congress to get rid of them (not that that would even be desirable).
First, background: After being a Republican for many years, I switched over to vote for Obama in '08.
If the Republicans had any real data mining going on, they'd have no problem finding my reasons for doing so. And yet all the spam I get from them is of the crazy religious fascist variety, and outright lying about easily checked facts. The exact sort of crap that drove me away. "How dare Obama require church-owned organizations to allow their employees to buy abortion-covering healthcare from a third party! We need to run him out of office before he takes away our guns!" Fuck off.
Meanwhile, I've found myself donating substantially less money to the Democrats this election cycle, precisely because I'm annoyed at the HUGE amount of spam they send me. Not a day goes by that I don't get at least one letter and five emails. Most days, I also get one or two phone calls. And the phone calls are always at terrible times. Like 6 AM (I've moved to the west coast dammit, how many times do I need to tell you!) or 3 PM on a weekday (some of us have real jobs, FYI).
Both sides have absolutely no idea how to appeal to the average voter. Republicans are offensive, and Democrats are obnoxious and incompetent. Quite a reflection of the parties' actions in office, come to think of it.
No, that's not at all what anarchy means. If you vote, through direct democracy, for a speed limit on a highway, and an anarchist gets pulled over for speeding on that highway, they're not going to accept the majority rule. They're going to scream and shout about how unjust it all, and possibly murder the cop who tries to give them the ticket.
I'm pretty sure the GP wasn't calling rights "mumbo jumbo", but rather pointing to the irony of anarchists enjoying the rights that they fight to eradicate.
No coincidence, but not a conspiracy either. Kaspersky wants to sell protection throughout the Middle East, and this is a great way to market it. The US & European firms know that such a marketing strategy would be a lost cause for them.
While I agree with you on the Oxford comma, there's a better way of fixing this sentence: get rid of the over-reliance on parallelism. As it stands the "This is contrary to" is mirrored across both halves of the phrase, but readers might only apply it to the first half. So reduce the paralleled phrase by one word, making the sentence "This is contrary to law, and to sound economic policy." Now there's no way to misread it.
So what? No writer should earn a living because there are some bad ones? There are bad engineers too, should we stop paying all engineers? For that matter, there are bad teachers, and construction workers, and doctors, and every other profession you care to name. I guess we should just stop paying everyone.
Depends on the job, obviously. Doctors probably get asked questions about lymph nodes, which I'm sure is equally irrelevant to your work. Would you like to complain about that, as well?
No, you're completely wrong. In fact, it's difficult to even parse what you're trying to say.
Yes, there are units called "kilowatt-hours". Really, that's just a kilowatt multiplied by an hour. The existence of such a unit has absolutely no bearing on this discussion, since we're talking about "gigawatts per hour". To put it in units more familiar to you, the phrase "miles per hour" makes perfect sense. But the phrase "mile-hours" is basically meaningless.*
A gigawatt per hour isn't a unit of "flow". It would be more akin to a unit of acceleration. If your power plant generates 5 GW/hr, then that would mean it starts off generating nothing, and after an hour its producing 5 GW, and after 2 hours it's producing 10 GW, and so on. That's clearly not what the summary is trying to suggest.
*Before anyone gets pedantic, yes, GW/hr and miles*hours and cubits*Rankine/Farads are all meaningful in the mathematical sense. But in the practical sense, they're meaningless.
What was the utilitarian reason for landing on the moon? Saber-rattling? Hardly an important cause.
Trying to do something hard is a great way to spur innovation. Who better to make the effort than the federal government... an organization that can fund the attempt with less than 1% of its budget, and ensure that the resulting discoveries are available to the public. Even if we never build a base, we'll solve lots of hard engineering problems in the process, come up with innovations that can apply to other fields, and maybe even push back a little against a culture that more and more likes to celebrate idiocy and condemn intelligence.
Bullshit. Just off the top of my head, there was David Vitter, who got caught with prostitutes, and Mark Sanford, the guy who went "hiking" with his not-wife from Argentina. Both definitely worse than sexting women who were willing participants (Weiner's "crime"). And yet neither was run out of office. Why? Because Republicans don't give a shit about morals when it would put them at a disadvantage.
Of course, if you get all your news from Fox and similar propaganda outlets, you'd be likely to believe that only Democrats get caught in scandals. Maybe you should step away from the bullshit spewers before you become one of them. That is, if it's not already too late.
How the hell is this insightful? We should destroy the historical remnants of one of humanity's greatest achievements, because that's what the tyrants of humanity's darkest era would have done?
Please tell me this is some sort of joke that the mods are in on. No one could possibly be so stupid...right?
1) The guy is mayor of a town of 1 square mile. There are more people in most universities than in this guy's town. You really think any party big-wigs even know he exists? 2) He got his seat by running as an independent against a Democrat, so if you're obsessed with labels, he'd be a left-leaning independent. 3) Based on Wikipedia, he's buddy-buddy with Chris Christie, so he's not even that left-leaning (note: Christie probably doesn't give two shits about this bush league yokel)
Stop obsessing over party affiliation so much. At the federal level, it's important. At the state level, less so. At the local level, not in the slightest.
People already made the case for them, that's why they're law. If you want to get rid of them, you have to make a case for that. We don't just reset the government every time some asshole demands it.
If you don't like any of it, then you're free to leave. I'm sure you can find yourself a utopia without any government services.
Quite the opposite. This is great news for the RIAA and the like. Now whenever they do their scattershot lawsuits, they have a rock solid legal argument. "No your honor, we don't have any evidence. But statistically speaking, the defendant is almost certainly guilty!"
Maybe the person was really lynching the guy wearing flip flops, who just happened to be black!
That's a pretty lame example, but sure, in some fantasy world in which people lynch people for wearing flip flops, then yes, that would be a hate crime. No one should have to live in fear of wearing certain footwear. If someone grabs you in the parking lot and starts stomping the shit out of you while screaming about your bad fashion sense, that person is committing a hate crime.
Should a completely secular serial killer be let off easy, simply because "hey, at least he/she didn't target a specific group"?
They're not being let off easy, they're just not getting an additional penalty heaped on top. It's just like there's an extra penalty for using a handgun in the commission of a felony. If someone commits murder with a knife, you don't say they're getting off easy.
Do the police not protect black people? Do the courts refuse to take on cases against black people?
They do, and hate crime laws are a part of that protection. And guess what, hate crime laws protect white, straight men as well! You'd never know it, getting your world view exclusively from Rupert Murdoch, but people do get charged with hate crimes for targeting white people. I recall a case around Seattle a few years back where some guy got beat up, burned with cigarettes, and left in an alley by a couple of black guys who were calling him a cracker and all that. They got charged with a hate crime. So drop the "white men are the most victimized group" crap. Rush just says all that to stroke your ego.
There's another way. Stop this suicidal race to the bottom. It would be nice if we had CEOs that weren't a bunch of Randist supermen, who might actually consider helping the society that let them reach their current heights. Since that doesn't seem likely to happen, I'd settle for raising their taxes. They always complain that increasing taxes will drive away the job creators. From where I sit, those people aren't creating any American jobs, so their argument falls flat.
But your intent in all of those contrived examples wasn't to hurt the whole group. In a hate crime, the criminal is intentionally targeting a whole community.
And don't give me that crap about "we shouldn't be punishing people based on intent". It's commonly accepted that we punish premeditated murder more harshly than murder in the heat of the moment, which in turn is punished more harshly than an accidental killing.
The fact is, most people who oppose hate crimes do so because they agree with the Republicans on other issues, so they just adopt the party platform. And the party has to pander to the minority of people who oppose hate crimes because they're bigots.
It's worse because when you target someone for an attribute, then aside from the harm you inflict on them, you are also terrorizing all the people like them. If you lynch a black guy, all of the other black guys in the community are now afraid to go out in public because they might be next.
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"First thing" is an idiom. It doesn't mean the literal first thing. I'd have preferred him to have done it even faster, but the majority were out within 18 months of his taking office. Of all the things you could pick to complain about in his presidency, this one seems pretty damn minor.
But all of that is irrelevant, because that's not what this entire thread of discussion was over. We were discussing cpu's assertion that Obama said "If our troops are not out of Iraq and Afghanistan by the time I take office, I will bring them home my first year. You can bank on it!" That claim has been shown to be doubly a lie. Firstly, he wasn't referring to Afghanistan, only Iraq. Secondly, he did not give a timeline, just an idiomatic assertion that he'd get it done soon.
Yes, class action lawsuits don't help the victims. Neither does putting murderers in jail. But the goal is to give people and businesses a reason to think twice before committing a despicable act. Thanks to SCOTUS's decision that companies can stick a "you can't sue us!" clause in any and all contracts, there is now no mechanism by which companies can be made to pay for abusing their customers. Day-dreaming about alternate mechanisms is pointless. This is the one that we have (or had, at any rate), and for all its flaws, it did work. Companies that abused people were made to pay. But no longer.
He was referring to the troops in Iraq during that speech. If you hadn't found a version that had been selectively edited by a YouTube user named "PresidentChimp", you might know that.
He was consistent through his campaign that he opposed the Iraq War and supported the Afghanistan War. You might disagree with that stance, but don't lie about what he said.
I'm so sick of people inventing "quotes" for others. This sort of debunking should go straight to +5.
Obama is anti deficit spending. He has come out publicly in favor of making multi-millionaires and billionaires pay at least the tax rates of their secretaries and taxing corporations that outsource jobs rather than those that keep jobs in the U.S.
That much is true, but he hasn't done squat to control spending.
Wrong. Obama has been very tight on spending. Check out the historical record.
Discretionary spending during Obama's first two terms (the only years with finalized data) averaged 9.1% of the GDP. Under Reagan, the average was 9.9%. The only reason Obama's spending seems high is because of the mandatory spending categories like Social Security and unemployment benefits. Those go up when we're in recession, for obvious reasons, and it would take a major act of Congress to get rid of them (not that that would even be desirable).
First, background: After being a Republican for many years, I switched over to vote for Obama in '08.
If the Republicans had any real data mining going on, they'd have no problem finding my reasons for doing so. And yet all the spam I get from them is of the crazy religious fascist variety, and outright lying about easily checked facts. The exact sort of crap that drove me away. "How dare Obama require church-owned organizations to allow their employees to buy abortion-covering healthcare from a third party! We need to run him out of office before he takes away our guns!" Fuck off.
Meanwhile, I've found myself donating substantially less money to the Democrats this election cycle, precisely because I'm annoyed at the HUGE amount of spam they send me. Not a day goes by that I don't get at least one letter and five emails. Most days, I also get one or two phone calls. And the phone calls are always at terrible times. Like 6 AM (I've moved to the west coast dammit, how many times do I need to tell you!) or 3 PM on a weekday (some of us have real jobs, FYI).
Both sides have absolutely no idea how to appeal to the average voter. Republicans are offensive, and Democrats are obnoxious and incompetent. Quite a reflection of the parties' actions in office, come to think of it.
No, that's not at all what anarchy means. If you vote, through direct democracy, for a speed limit on a highway, and an anarchist gets pulled over for speeding on that highway, they're not going to accept the majority rule. They're going to scream and shout about how unjust it all, and possibly murder the cop who tries to give them the ticket.
I'm pretty sure the GP wasn't calling rights "mumbo jumbo", but rather pointing to the irony of anarchists enjoying the rights that they fight to eradicate.
No coincidence, but not a conspiracy either. Kaspersky wants to sell protection throughout the Middle East, and this is a great way to market it. The US & European firms know that such a marketing strategy would be a lost cause for them.
While I agree with you on the Oxford comma, there's a better way of fixing this sentence: get rid of the over-reliance on parallelism. As it stands the "This is contrary to" is mirrored across both halves of the phrase, but readers might only apply it to the first half. So reduce the paralleled phrase by one word, making the sentence "This is contrary to law, and to sound economic policy." Now there's no way to misread it.
So what? No writer should earn a living because there are some bad ones? There are bad engineers too, should we stop paying all engineers? For that matter, there are bad teachers, and construction workers, and doctors, and every other profession you care to name. I guess we should just stop paying everyone.
Depends on the job, obviously. Doctors probably get asked questions about lymph nodes, which I'm sure is equally irrelevant to your work. Would you like to complain about that, as well?
I want you to lose. I think that authors deserve to earn a decent living. So I'll keep buying books and supporting authors I enjoy.
No, you're completely wrong. In fact, it's difficult to even parse what you're trying to say.
Yes, there are units called "kilowatt-hours". Really, that's just a kilowatt multiplied by an hour. The existence of such a unit has absolutely no bearing on this discussion, since we're talking about "gigawatts per hour". To put it in units more familiar to you, the phrase "miles per hour" makes perfect sense. But the phrase "mile-hours" is basically meaningless.*
A gigawatt per hour isn't a unit of "flow". It would be more akin to a unit of acceleration. If your power plant generates 5 GW/hr, then that would mean it starts off generating nothing, and after an hour its producing 5 GW, and after 2 hours it's producing 10 GW, and so on. That's clearly not what the summary is trying to suggest.
*Before anyone gets pedantic, yes, GW/hr and miles*hours and cubits*Rankine/Farads are all meaningful in the mathematical sense. But in the practical sense, they're meaningless.
What was the utilitarian reason for landing on the moon? Saber-rattling? Hardly an important cause.
Trying to do something hard is a great way to spur innovation. Who better to make the effort than the federal government... an organization that can fund the attempt with less than 1% of its budget, and ensure that the resulting discoveries are available to the public. Even if we never build a base, we'll solve lots of hard engineering problems in the process, come up with innovations that can apply to other fields, and maybe even push back a little against a culture that more and more likes to celebrate idiocy and condemn intelligence.
Bullshit. Just off the top of my head, there was David Vitter, who got caught with prostitutes, and Mark Sanford, the guy who went "hiking" with his not-wife from Argentina. Both definitely worse than sexting women who were willing participants (Weiner's "crime"). And yet neither was run out of office. Why? Because Republicans don't give a shit about morals when it would put them at a disadvantage.
Of course, if you get all your news from Fox and similar propaganda outlets, you'd be likely to believe that only Democrats get caught in scandals. Maybe you should step away from the bullshit spewers before you become one of them. That is, if it's not already too late.
How the hell is this insightful? We should destroy the historical remnants of one of humanity's greatest achievements, because that's what the tyrants of humanity's darkest era would have done?
Please tell me this is some sort of joke that the mods are in on. No one could possibly be so stupid ...right?
1) The guy is mayor of a town of 1 square mile. There are more people in most universities than in this guy's town. You really think any party big-wigs even know he exists?
2) He got his seat by running as an independent against a Democrat, so if you're obsessed with labels, he'd be a left-leaning independent.
3) Based on Wikipedia, he's buddy-buddy with Chris Christie, so he's not even that left-leaning (note: Christie probably doesn't give two shits about this bush league yokel)
Stop obsessing over party affiliation so much. At the federal level, it's important. At the state level, less so. At the local level, not in the slightest.
People already made the case for them, that's why they're law. If you want to get rid of them, you have to make a case for that. We don't just reset the government every time some asshole demands it.
If you don't like any of it, then you're free to leave. I'm sure you can find yourself a utopia without any government services.
Quite the opposite. This is great news for the RIAA and the like. Now whenever they do their scattershot lawsuits, they have a rock solid legal argument. "No your honor, we don't have any evidence. But statistically speaking, the defendant is almost certainly guilty!"
The Nazis also found highways useful. Do you use highways? Are you a Nazi?
Maybe the person was really lynching the guy wearing flip flops, who just happened to be black!
That's a pretty lame example, but sure, in some fantasy world in which people lynch people for wearing flip flops, then yes, that would be a hate crime. No one should have to live in fear of wearing certain footwear. If someone grabs you in the parking lot and starts stomping the shit out of you while screaming about your bad fashion sense, that person is committing a hate crime.
Should a completely secular serial killer be let off easy, simply because "hey, at least he/she didn't target a specific group"?
They're not being let off easy, they're just not getting an additional penalty heaped on top. It's just like there's an extra penalty for using a handgun in the commission of a felony. If someone commits murder with a knife, you don't say they're getting off easy.
Do the police not protect black people? Do the courts refuse to take on cases against black people?
They do, and hate crime laws are a part of that protection. And guess what, hate crime laws protect white, straight men as well! You'd never know it, getting your world view exclusively from Rupert Murdoch, but people do get charged with hate crimes for targeting white people. I recall a case around Seattle a few years back where some guy got beat up, burned with cigarettes, and left in an alley by a couple of black guys who were calling him a cracker and all that. They got charged with a hate crime. So drop the "white men are the most victimized group" crap. Rush just says all that to stroke your ego.
There's another way. Stop this suicidal race to the bottom. It would be nice if we had CEOs that weren't a bunch of Randist supermen, who might actually consider helping the society that let them reach their current heights. Since that doesn't seem likely to happen, I'd settle for raising their taxes. They always complain that increasing taxes will drive away the job creators. From where I sit, those people aren't creating any American jobs, so their argument falls flat.
But your intent in all of those contrived examples wasn't to hurt the whole group. In a hate crime, the criminal is intentionally targeting a whole community.
And don't give me that crap about "we shouldn't be punishing people based on intent". It's commonly accepted that we punish premeditated murder more harshly than murder in the heat of the moment, which in turn is punished more harshly than an accidental killing.
The fact is, most people who oppose hate crimes do so because they agree with the Republicans on other issues, so they just adopt the party platform. And the party has to pander to the minority of people who oppose hate crimes because they're bigots.
It's worse because when you target someone for an attribute, then aside from the harm you inflict on them, you are also terrorizing all the people like them. If you lynch a black guy, all of the other black guys in the community are now afraid to go out in public because they might be next.