I am a white Christian man, and no, I don't see any significant hatred towards me. A few obnoxious atheists who are either passing through, or never grew out of, the I've-got-it-all-figured-out phase, but that's really about it. And even those are pretty much only on the internet.
Also, your copy-pasted science is talking about discriminating against people based on their political stance, not because they are white or Christian or male. If someone starts ranting about how Obama is gonna set up death panels, which was not at all uncommon among Republicans just a few years ago, then yeah, I'm gonna think they're an idiot and treat them accordingly. But that's on the basis of their personal actions, not because of a group that they belong to.
Republicans arent saints, but this projection syndrome isnt one of their flaws.
Hahaha, holy shit, you can't possibly be that blind. Rush Limbaugh himself is an addict that rails against drug users. And how many homophobic Republicans have been caught in gay sex scandals? How many complain about wasteful spending, while throwing away trillions on pointless wars?
Yet somehow you didn't think of any of that. They really have got you, haven't they? It's amazing what a steady diet of propaganda can do to a man.
I looked at the top seven articles from a google search on "senator yee"
Let's go into detail on that then. Ignoring the Wikipedia page, we have:
#1: Fox News - Waits all the way till sentence 18 to identify him as a Democrat. Are you prepared to argue that Fox is biased in favor of Democrats? #2: CBS - No mention. That's one. #3: ABC - Mentioned in the first sentence. #4: NBC - Mentioned, but several paragraphs down. #5: Mercury News: Mentioned in the first sentence. #6: Mentioned in the second sentence. #7: Mentioned in the 13th sentence.
So it's only omitted once, and only really buried one other time. In every other case, you need to read 20 or fewer sentences. And the third "worst" is Fox News, who you can't possibly claim to be biased against Republicans. Do you really believe there's malice there? And not just reporters figuring that his affiliation doesn't have anything to do with his crime?
I can't pull up a Republican, because I don't know of any who have recently been arrested. And if I Google "Republican arrested", I'm obviously going to get articles mentioning party affiliation. That's the brilliant thing about this lie that right-wing media outlets have been pushing. It won't be on your mind next time a Republican gets arrested, so you won't look for it. But whenever a Democrat gets arrested, you'll have some more fuel for your hatred.
How many other newspapers did you have to look at to find one where the affiliation is mentioned near the top?
It was the very first one. NY Times is my go-to news source. But I can do some more.
Next up is the Washington Post. I can't find this subject there, but here's their top article on corruption. Again it's a Democrat, and again that fact is in the second sentence.
Now let's check the first corruption-related article in the Seattle Times. Another story on the mayor from the WaPo article. This time you have to read all the way to the fourth sentence to find his party affiliation.
Get the point yet?
This is a regular lie that Republicans trot out. They just love to play the victim. See also: "white Christian men are the most oppressed group in America".
Holy shit, how can people be so clueless. You think an unemployed programmer should just pack up his family, ditch his mortgage, and move to fucking Vietnam to work for a dollar a day? When is he going to find the time to learn a language, while he's struggling to feed his family? How's he going to afford the trip? What makes you think his chosen country will even allow him to immigrate in the first place? What makes you think there will even be jobs there, if the problem is technology making human labor unnecessary?
No, you know what he can, should, and will do? He'll fucking murder you, and take your stuff. If your world view relies on the underclass laying down and dying for your convenience, you're going to be in for a rude, and fully deserved, awakening.
Objectivity is when your own tastes and preferences do not influence your decision-making about anything important.
Then objectivity doesn't exist, outside of some simple math problems. If you think that people have "never truly reached adulthood" until they can do this, then we're living in Never Never Land.
People aren't computers. We're all influenced by our upbringing, our beliefs, our experiences. You can (and should!) expose yourself to new things, and broaden your perspective a bit, but that just means you have a broader base of things to influence your thinking, not that you've become objective.
No, he's not asking questions, he's making insinuations. Like clockwork, in every single discussion on some new technology, there will always be at least one jackass trying to seem smart by suggesting that those idiot scientists missed something important. Every. Single. Time.
Functional sub-nanometer LED? Pfft. No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Phew, it's a good thing we have a random dude on the internet to tell us how worthless this is. Just think of how many hours could have been wasted by PhD-holding engineers and physicists if we didn't have Miamicanes to set them straight!
I knew you would make that argument, people always do. But it's deceptive. You don't have a choice to buy most things in life. You cannot live in most places without a car, a phone, clothing, food, shelter, etc. You might have a couple different companies to choose from, but they'll all converge on a similar pricing model, because they're all trying to maximize profit in the same environment.
So what are you gonna do? Live off the grid? That's not a choice for the vast majority of people. If even 0.1% of people tried it, there would be a mass die-off. The world wasn't able to support more than a few million people before modern society, and it hasn't gotten any better. So what are the other 7,140,000,000 people going to do?
There are never multiple governments competing for the taxpayer's money, on any basis.
Are you fucking kidding me? Nearly every country in the world competes for taxpayer's money. Everyone is constantly offering tax breaks to this company or that, trying to get them to come build factories. Companies headquarter themselves in a PO box in a low tax nation. Millionaires constantly threaten to move, and occasionally do, in response to income taxes. Even regular people move out of high tax states like Massachusetts and California.
Seriously, you can argue opposing points if you wish, but don't just go making shit up.
No, they're always fair. If our premise is that it's "fair" for corporations to extract the maximum amount of wealth from people, then surely it is also "fair" for people to extract the maximum amount of wealth from corporations.
It, again, comes down to willingness to pay. It is fair for the companies to raise prices as high as possible without scaring off their customer base. It is fair for government to raise taxes as high as possible without scaring off their tax base.
My bill with Verizon dropped 40% after I threatened to switch carriers. Cell phone plans are a beautiful example of how prices are set based on the market's willingness to pay, not on the actual cost of the good or service.
Expect prices to continue to rise as companies employ more and more psychologists and statisticians to extract the absolute maximum amount of wealth from their consumers.
Society needs revenge for certain crimes, for the sake of all our mental health. When we see evil people going unpunished, or even rewarded, it depresses us. Can you provide any rationale for why we should care so much about the comfort of a serial killer? Try to do so without appealing to some mystical, absolutist morality. Good luck.
Note: we're talking about serious crimes here. Non-violent offenders shouldn't be facing prison time at all, let alone solitary.
Wait, what? I'm the one arguing in favor of arbitrary lines here. That we should say "You can refuse service at your discretion, except in cases X, Y, and Z". I concede that that does open the door to more lawsuits. You'll doubtless have cases of someone denying service because the customer is gay, but claiming it's for some other reason. But I think we should be willing to pay that price, rather than compel people to take ANY customer, or else close up shop.
And I agree Congress won't do anything, which is why I suggested letting the courts handle it. A year ago, I would have been very pessimistic on that front, but after the DOMA ruling it seems that they're ready to recognize gay people as a protected class.
That sets a frightening precedent, and your support for it seems to rest on a line drawing fallacy.
Society is good at drawing semi-arbitrary lines and sticking to them. We have cut-off ages for "adult" vs. "minor". We have cut-off dollar amounts for "petty theft" vs "grand theft". We even have "protected classes" for exactly this sort of problem.
It seems like adding sexual orientation (and, while we're at it, gender identity) to the list of protected classes would be a better solution. SCOTUS already kind of made sexual orientation a protected class in the DOMA ruling last year. Just let the courts strike Arizona's law down under the same logic.
Problem solved, no need for scary new precedents wherein people can be compelled to fight against causes they care about.
Well, I think this sort of law is particularly dangerous in small towns. What if there are only three restaurants in the town, and all of them refuse service to gay people? What if you literally can't rent an apartment in town because every landlord turns you away the moment they see your husband?
You might not want a homophobe making your wedding cake, but you might prefer it to not being able to get a cake at all.
So let's say the KKK comes to your cake shop, and asks for a cake decorated with a panorama of a lynching. You presumably don't feel comfortable spending hours of your life hand-crafting such a disgusting scene. Should you be imprisoned for telling them to go elsewhere?
Doesn't freedom in speech include the right to not participate in speech you don't like? Can you really be compelled to say something you disagree with, just because someone offered to pay you?
I am 100% against the Arizona law, by the way, but I do think the question is more complex than people are acknowledging.
Look pal, if you just want to launch off into random political screeds, do it in the shower. No one has said we should abolish the military, and you know it.
The problem is that the sequester is 50% defense, 50% everything else, but the defense budget is a minority of the Federal budget. That pushes the cuts disproportionately on the defense side.
Totally irrational. The fact that the defense budget is a minority of the overall budget does not mean that it is a minority of the waste. The defense sector is filled with bloat, and is essentially just functioning as a make-work program in the districts of influential representatives. It would be far more efficient to take that same money and spend it on more direct social services.
I don't see how that's relevant. We're talking about negotiations here. Increased military spending and decreased social spending are both things Republicans want.
I was pointing out that the Republicans don't have anything they're willing to trade in order to stem the sequester cuts to military spending. The only way they could stave off the cuts would be by accepting increased taxes, and they're not willing to do that.
I get the feeling you took my comment as a slight against Republicans, and posted some knee-jerk response. I'm only pointing out the reality of the negotiations.
If these changes go through, it will actually reduce spending. We spent $670B on "defense" in 2013. This change would get us down to around $500B for the 2015 budget.
This was already passed as a part of the sequester -- this story is really just discussing how the Pentagon plans to get under the limit set by the law. The budget that got passed in December rolled back a few of the sequester cuts, and I'm sure Republicans will push to roll back more. However, the Democrats will want new taxes on the rich to offset any further increases in military spending, and I doubt the Republicans will budge on that front, so any further changes are likely to be minimal.
It looks like this is actually going to happen, and it's about damn time.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a white Christian man, and no, I don't see any significant hatred towards me. A few obnoxious atheists who are either passing through, or never grew out of, the I've-got-it-all-figured-out phase, but that's really about it. And even those are pretty much only on the internet.
Also, your copy-pasted science is talking about discriminating against people based on their political stance, not because they are white or Christian or male. If someone starts ranting about how Obama is gonna set up death panels, which was not at all uncommon among Republicans just a few years ago, then yeah, I'm gonna think they're an idiot and treat them accordingly. But that's on the basis of their personal actions, not because of a group that they belong to.
Republicans arent saints, but this projection syndrome isnt one of their flaws.
Hahaha, holy shit, you can't possibly be that blind. Rush Limbaugh himself is an addict that rails against drug users. And how many homophobic Republicans have been caught in gay sex scandals? How many complain about wasteful spending, while throwing away trillions on pointless wars?
Yet somehow you didn't think of any of that. They really have got you, haven't they? It's amazing what a steady diet of propaganda can do to a man.
I looked at the top seven articles from a google search on "senator yee"
Let's go into detail on that then. Ignoring the Wikipedia page, we have:
#1: Fox News - Waits all the way till sentence 18 to identify him as a Democrat. Are you prepared to argue that Fox is biased in favor of Democrats?
#2: CBS - No mention. That's one.
#3: ABC - Mentioned in the first sentence.
#4: NBC - Mentioned, but several paragraphs down.
#5: Mercury News: Mentioned in the first sentence.
#6: Mentioned in the second sentence.
#7: Mentioned in the 13th sentence.
So it's only omitted once, and only really buried one other time. In every other case, you need to read 20 or fewer sentences. And the third "worst" is Fox News, who you can't possibly claim to be biased against Republicans. Do you really believe there's malice there? And not just reporters figuring that his affiliation doesn't have anything to do with his crime?
I can't pull up a Republican, because I don't know of any who have recently been arrested. And if I Google "Republican arrested", I'm obviously going to get articles mentioning party affiliation. That's the brilliant thing about this lie that right-wing media outlets have been pushing. It won't be on your mind next time a Republican gets arrested, so you won't look for it. But whenever a Democrat gets arrested, you'll have some more fuel for your hatred.
How many other newspapers did you have to look at to find one where the affiliation is mentioned near the top?
It was the very first one. NY Times is my go-to news source. But I can do some more.
Next up is the Washington Post. I can't find this subject there, but here's their top article on corruption. Again it's a Democrat, and again that fact is in the second sentence.
Now let's check the first corruption-related article in the Seattle Times. Another story on the mayor from the WaPo article. This time you have to read all the way to the fourth sentence to find his party affiliation.
Get the point yet?
This is a regular lie that Republicans trot out. They just love to play the victim. See also: "white Christian men are the most oppressed group in America".
ahem
Here's the blurb in the New York Times on this topic. Party affiliation is in the second sentence.
Stop lying.
I'm telling you man, in just a few years, NOT having a calculator on your watch is going to seem quaint and backwards!
Being eaten by tigers was also common and natural. Natural is not a synonym for healthy.
This study is a long way from proving anything, but I suspect a lot of people will just dismiss it entirely because they don't want to believe it.
Holy shit, how can people be so clueless. You think an unemployed programmer should just pack up his family, ditch his mortgage, and move to fucking Vietnam to work for a dollar a day? When is he going to find the time to learn a language, while he's struggling to feed his family? How's he going to afford the trip? What makes you think his chosen country will even allow him to immigrate in the first place? What makes you think there will even be jobs there, if the problem is technology making human labor unnecessary?
No, you know what he can, should, and will do? He'll fucking murder you, and take your stuff. If your world view relies on the underclass laying down and dying for your convenience, you're going to be in for a rude, and fully deserved, awakening.
Objectivity is when your own tastes and preferences do not influence your decision-making about anything important.
Then objectivity doesn't exist, outside of some simple math problems. If you think that people have "never truly reached adulthood" until they can do this, then we're living in Never Never Land.
People aren't computers. We're all influenced by our upbringing, our beliefs, our experiences. You can (and should!) expose yourself to new things, and broaden your perspective a bit, but that just means you have a broader base of things to influence your thinking, not that you've become objective.
No, he's not asking questions, he's making insinuations. Like clockwork, in every single discussion on some new technology, there will always be at least one jackass trying to seem smart by suggesting that those idiot scientists missed something important. Every. Single. Time.
Functional sub-nanometer LED? Pfft. No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Phew, it's a good thing we have a random dude on the internet to tell us how worthless this is. Just think of how many hours could have been wasted by PhD-holding engineers and physicists if we didn't have Miamicanes to set them straight!
I knew you would make that argument, people always do. But it's deceptive. You don't have a choice to buy most things in life. You cannot live in most places without a car, a phone, clothing, food, shelter, etc. You might have a couple different companies to choose from, but they'll all converge on a similar pricing model, because they're all trying to maximize profit in the same environment.
So what are you gonna do? Live off the grid? That's not a choice for the vast majority of people. If even 0.1% of people tried it, there would be a mass die-off. The world wasn't able to support more than a few million people before modern society, and it hasn't gotten any better. So what are the other 7,140,000,000 people going to do?
There are never multiple governments competing for the taxpayer's money, on any basis.
Are you fucking kidding me? Nearly every country in the world competes for taxpayer's money. Everyone is constantly offering tax breaks to this company or that, trying to get them to come build factories. Companies headquarter themselves in a PO box in a low tax nation. Millionaires constantly threaten to move, and occasionally do, in response to income taxes. Even regular people move out of high tax states like Massachusetts and California.
Seriously, you can argue opposing points if you wish, but don't just go making shit up.
No, they're always fair. If our premise is that it's "fair" for corporations to extract the maximum amount of wealth from people, then surely it is also "fair" for people to extract the maximum amount of wealth from corporations.
It, again, comes down to willingness to pay. It is fair for the companies to raise prices as high as possible without scaring off their customer base. It is fair for government to raise taxes as high as possible without scaring off their tax base.
Of course any rational person would try to maximize profit. That's fair. You know what else is fair? Taxes and regulations.
Corporations have the right to maximize their profit in a given set of conditions. Society has the right to change those conditions.
My bill with Verizon dropped 40% after I threatened to switch carriers. Cell phone plans are a beautiful example of how prices are set based on the market's willingness to pay, not on the actual cost of the good or service.
Expect prices to continue to rise as companies employ more and more psychologists and statisticians to extract the absolute maximum amount of wealth from their consumers.
You don't know what his patent claims, aside from the oversimplification in the summary.
Society needs revenge for certain crimes, for the sake of all our mental health. When we see evil people going unpunished, or even rewarded, it depresses us. Can you provide any rationale for why we should care so much about the comfort of a serial killer? Try to do so without appealing to some mystical, absolutist morality. Good luck.
Note: we're talking about serious crimes here. Non-violent offenders shouldn't be facing prison time at all, let alone solitary.
Wait, what? I'm the one arguing in favor of arbitrary lines here. That we should say "You can refuse service at your discretion, except in cases X, Y, and Z". I concede that that does open the door to more lawsuits. You'll doubtless have cases of someone denying service because the customer is gay, but claiming it's for some other reason. But I think we should be willing to pay that price, rather than compel people to take ANY customer, or else close up shop.
And I agree Congress won't do anything, which is why I suggested letting the courts handle it. A year ago, I would have been very pessimistic on that front, but after the DOMA ruling it seems that they're ready to recognize gay people as a protected class.
That sets a frightening precedent, and your support for it seems to rest on a line drawing fallacy.
Society is good at drawing semi-arbitrary lines and sticking to them. We have cut-off ages for "adult" vs. "minor". We have cut-off dollar amounts for "petty theft" vs "grand theft". We even have "protected classes" for exactly this sort of problem.
It seems like adding sexual orientation (and, while we're at it, gender identity) to the list of protected classes would be a better solution. SCOTUS already kind of made sexual orientation a protected class in the DOMA ruling last year. Just let the courts strike Arizona's law down under the same logic.
Problem solved, no need for scary new precedents wherein people can be compelled to fight against causes they care about.
Well, I think this sort of law is particularly dangerous in small towns. What if there are only three restaurants in the town, and all of them refuse service to gay people? What if you literally can't rent an apartment in town because every landlord turns you away the moment they see your husband?
You might not want a homophobe making your wedding cake, but you might prefer it to not being able to get a cake at all.
So let's say the KKK comes to your cake shop, and asks for a cake decorated with a panorama of a lynching. You presumably don't feel comfortable spending hours of your life hand-crafting such a disgusting scene. Should you be imprisoned for telling them to go elsewhere?
Doesn't freedom in speech include the right to not participate in speech you don't like? Can you really be compelled to say something you disagree with, just because someone offered to pay you?
I am 100% against the Arizona law, by the way, but I do think the question is more complex than people are acknowledging.
Look pal, if you just want to launch off into random political screeds, do it in the shower. No one has said we should abolish the military, and you know it.
The problem is that the sequester is 50% defense, 50% everything else, but the defense budget is a minority of the Federal budget. That pushes the cuts disproportionately on the defense side.
Totally irrational. The fact that the defense budget is a minority of the overall budget does not mean that it is a minority of the waste. The defense sector is filled with bloat, and is essentially just functioning as a make-work program in the districts of influential representatives. It would be far more efficient to take that same money and spend it on more direct social services.
I don't see how that's relevant. We're talking about negotiations here. Increased military spending and decreased social spending are both things Republicans want.
I was pointing out that the Republicans don't have anything they're willing to trade in order to stem the sequester cuts to military spending. The only way they could stave off the cuts would be by accepting increased taxes, and they're not willing to do that.
I get the feeling you took my comment as a slight against Republicans, and posted some knee-jerk response. I'm only pointing out the reality of the negotiations.
If these changes go through, it will actually reduce spending. We spent $670B on "defense" in 2013. This change would get us down to around $500B for the 2015 budget.
This was already passed as a part of the sequester -- this story is really just discussing how the Pentagon plans to get under the limit set by the law. The budget that got passed in December rolled back a few of the sequester cuts, and I'm sure Republicans will push to roll back more. However, the Democrats will want new taxes on the rich to offset any further increases in military spending, and I doubt the Republicans will budge on that front, so any further changes are likely to be minimal.
It looks like this is actually going to happen, and it's about damn time.