Lots of time, money, and effort has been spent studying vaccines in the wake of Dr. Andrew "brought the medical profession into disrepute" Wakefield's original paper (which has since been retracted along with his UK license to practice medicine).
Wakefield made generic and nonsensical claims about dangers of vaccines. People now respond with generic and nonsensical claims about the benefits of vaccines. Both sides are wrong. You have to look at vaccines one at a time to determine whether they are safe and effective.
Each vaccine mandate should require a separate, public debate and separate legislative act because establishing the principle that government can mandate citizens to inject arbitrary proteins into their body without legislative action is fundamentally wrong.
The only illusion here is your illusion that you have a choice.
By your reasoning, we might as well turn ourselves into a totalitarian superstate. After all, all the freedoms we have day-to-day are just an "illusion" anyway since under exceptional circumstances, they could be taken away.
This debate isn't about health or religion, it's about power. You can see this by noting that the debate isn't weighing the cost and benefits for specific vaccines, it's about vaccine requirements in general, requirements that can likely be increased simply through regulation based on the vote of some panel. It's about whether society can force you to have substances injected into every citizen because a few government experts decide that it's the right thing to do.
Sometimes we don't have a choice to force people to do things with their body against their will, but that is an extreme measure. A much simpler way of achieving the same goal is to give individual employers, schools, towns, and communities the right and ability to require documentation of vaccination to allow your presence on premises. That achieves pretty much the same goal as a universal vaccination requirement, but it is far less draconian.
Although such restrictions achieve pretty much the same goal, they are rooted in the principle of freedom of association. Freedom of association is a good principle that we should uphold because it's a democratic and distributed principle of government. The principle that government can inject stuff into anybody's body at any time because some panel says it's a good thing to do is a bad principle, because it is centralized and prone to abuse.
(Forced vaccination is also not all that effective in achieving what its proponents claim. If you are in a population with a suppressed immune system, widespread vaccination will not protect you from disease, for the reason the article mentions: vaccinations are not completely effective anyway, and outbreaks happen even in completely vaccinated populations. In addition, there are many other diseases we can't vaccinated against. So, anybody at risk needs to control their exposure to other people anyway and no vaccination mandate is going to change that.)
Voting third party may not bring in "better", but it will at least do SOMETHING different than the Repubs and Dems
Although voting third party may be a last resort, you should really pay more attention to primaries in either party. The differences between primary candidates within a party are often as big if not bigger than between parties.
You seem to want to have it both ways, first arguing that foreign workers are less efficient, and then arguing that they are less expensive for the same work.
If they are less efficient, then we don't need visa rules because companies won't hire them; Microsoft knows better than USCIS what kind of workers Microsoft needs.
If foreign workers are both willing and able to do the same work as American workers for less money, then keeping them out of the country won't help, because they will simply compete with American workers from overseas, usually with lower overhead and less regulation to boot.
If you impose both tariffs on products and restrict the movement of labor, you do indeed raise the salary of US workers, but it doesn't help because prices also rise, and in addition you lose the benefits of comparative advantage.
So, I don't see how any of what you say translates into "we must restrict H-1b visas" or "we must have wage tariffs"; generally, restricting or taxing either the movement of goods or of labor makes society worse off overall, although special interests may benefit.
The irony is that the despicable British masters did away with that barbaric practice decades before this liberty-lovin' new nation, and they accomplished it without killing additional hundreds of thousands.
The British got rid of it because they didn't need slaves anymore; mechanization had created an impoverished and desperate underclass that was much easier to exploit without the responsibilities that come along with owning slaves. And racism and oppression continued to be government policies in much of the European colonial empires until the 20th century.
Enforcement refers to the law. What is so difficult to grasp about this?
I have seen no evidence that there is substantial racial discrimination in law enforcement; there are only racial disparities.
A racist policy would be one that *pretends* to give equal opportunity while subtly stacking the deck for or against one or more groups.
Well, we don't have any such policies, so that's a hypothetical point.
But I can say that you clearly show a wide streak of what you so readily want to smear me with.
There are two senses of racism, yours and mine.
Yours is the modern one of Democrats and progressives, which roughly amounts to: "doesn't agree with the favorable treatment we want to give to African Americans in order to make up for past mistreatment". To you, race-blind government is racist.
Mine is the simple and logical one, namely: discriminates in government policies based on race. To me, any discrimination based on race is racism, for the simple reason that "race" just isn't a valid concept. There is no such thing as a "Caucasian" or an "African American"; those are arbitrary categories people sort themselves into for various cultural reasons.
Now, the second error people like you make is that you think that people like me take our position out of greed; you think that we don't want to give special treatment to African Americans because it would mean we need to make sacrifices or give up privileges. But the actual reason is that the supposedly favorable treatment you want to give to blacks is actually hurting them, and this is nothing new. The racism of Democrats and progressives has been justified for more than a century by helping African Americans (and they have genuinely believed that that's what they were doing, just like you are), and it has always hurt them.
In fact, the attitude can be traced back to colonialism, in which the British, French, and Spanish also justified colonialism and brutal oppression by saying that they were actually helping the lesser races.
I'm sorry you keep viewing our exchange as a trading of insults. It's not. I'm simply telling you to reflect on what you are saying.
For a long time there have been tariffs to protect the importation of cheap goods (lumber, steel, etc.) from foreign countries into the USA. This system allows US companies to compete fairly against goods from other countries where wages and regulations give them an unfair advantage.
We have been getting rid of tariffs on goods because they are little more than corporate welfare and because they hurt Americans, in particular low income Americans.
The only shortage is the number of US IT workers that are willing to work for sub par wages.
Even if that were true, it wouldn't change anything. If the IT industry can't find US workers to do these jobs at the wages they want to pay, they either move the jobs overseas or get out of that business entirely because they can't compete with overseas businesses. What "wage tariffs" don't accomplish is getting more US IT workers more and higher paying jobs.
The only way US workers get higher paying jobs (and that also means better benefits and better security) than overseas workers is by actually being better. If an overseas worker can immigrate and replace you, you simply aren't worth more than that overseas worker. Having a US passport doesn't entitle you to a wage premium, much as you may feel you are entitled to it.
And the "Revolutionary" War could have accomplished that in America if only all the rebellious colonists had been able to bridge the moral & logical contradiction of casting of their own chains while keeping the yoke firmly on the necks of the black Africans that their British masters forced into permanent hereditary slavery.
The revolutionaries were well aware of the injustice of slavery. But they were also well aware that the revolution wouldn't have been successful if they had pushed for that as part of the revolution itself. I suggest you read up on the French and German revolutions to see what happened with revolutions that bit off more than they could chew, and the bloodshed that resulted.
African-Americans continued to be a social underclass long after the end of the Civil War and the vast majority of white Americans were either willing participants in racial discrimination or complicit.
You're just bullshitting without facts or even a clear idea of what you are saying.
Only if equal protection means equal ENFORCEMENT; getting to that point for all social classes & minorities has been a long fight, not yet over.
I have no idea what "equal ENFORCEMENT" is even supposed to mean. The distinction in US politics is equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. You advocate equality of outcome, which, although you seem incapable of grasping this, is a racist policy.
That is equally true of Republicans and conservatives - you just have to listen closely when they speak.
Well, yes, you accuse anybody of racism who doesn't subscribe to your twisted racial ideologies. That is another common thread throughout the history of progressivism and fascism. I suppose an attack and accusation is the best defense, isn't it?
In different words, I frankly don't care anymore whether people like you call me a racist, a misogynist, or a homophobe. You have misused and tainted those terms to the point that they have become meaningless.
Again, the question isn't why this particular probe wasn't using RTGs, the question is whether, as an engineering solution, RTGs would work for this kind of probe. And the answer is that RTGs are vastly superior to other power sources for almost any probe of almost any size. If there wasn't so much political b.s. surrounding RTGs, they would be cheap and easily available.
Frankly, I'm not sure it's worth even bothering with a long range space program if we don't use RTGs; other power sources are so short-lived that we are paying orders of magnitude more than we should for the scientific data that our probes yield.
As you are well aware, I'm referring to the people on the grand jury - their bias is probably more complicated than just black / white or Republican / Democrat
As I was saying: the biases of the grand jury are nobody's business and not subject to public scrutiny.
There's not a country called Africa and the types and status of slaves there were makes for considerable complexity given the size and diversity of the continent but in most cases
That is completely irrelevant since I'm not trying to imply an equivalence between slavery in Africa and slavery in the Americas.
What I am saying is that ideas about history are fundamentally wrong. Black Africans were enslaved by other black Africans and shipped to the Americas by European colonial powers (and most of them not to North America). Furthermore, the vast majority of white Americans today are descendants of people who either fought slavery or had nothing to do with slavery at all. Even if the concept of inherited guilt were valid, the vast majority of white Americans have inherited no guilt related to slavery.
And while many countries wrestled with the question of slavery for a long time, I can't think of any other in Europe or the Western Hemisphere that required a rather un-Civil War to settle the question.
European aristocracies didn't need to import slaves or have separate slavery laws because they effectively owned all the human beings within their domains. You're right: those systems of human ownership weren't ended by civil wars, they were ended by revolutions.
European revolutions were motivated by self-interest of the oppressed, often related to starvation and brutal oppression. In the US, the vast majority of Union soldiers were volunteers, making personal sacrifices in order to liberate oppressed people in the South. Which one is more noble? Putting your life at risk because you want to improve your own situation, or putting your life at risk to help others?
If the 310+ million non-gay Americans decided tomorrow to reinstitute slavery but only for the non-hetero population, there's fuck-all you could do to stop them
Fortunately, most Americans are not your kind of evil bastard who thinks that individual rights are things granted by majority whim. Most people in the US still realize that the US is a society based on laws and the protection of individual liberties, even for individuals that one disagrees with.
Hmmph, I've never met an independent who so indulges in continuous demagoguery that the ills of American society are the fault of "Democrats & progressives"
Which part of Republicans is largely indistinguishable from the left wing political machine of the Democrats; they simply choose different groups to be corrupted by. did you not understand? I don't blame "the ills of American society" on Democrats, I point out specifically that Democrats and progressives have a long history of racism and that that history continues today.
No, I don't believe that social progress only occurs through government action but at some point, it needs the support of law.
Bullshit. What we need is equal protection under the law, nothing more, and we got that.
Your example isn't reasonable. As a virus evolves, disease doesn't just take longer to manifest itself, it also becomes milder in the process and manifests in fewer people. That's why I gave the examples of those other viruses; they are a roadmap of how HIV will likely evolve. And yes, that is a good thing.
Saying "you'd rather stop" is a false dichotomy: you don't have the choice. In addition, wasting resources on viruses that cause less serious and less frequent disease means people suffer and die unnecessarily.
I don't look forward to a world where AIDS only manifests after 30 years, but everyone has it.
You mean like HPV, HSV, EBV, CMV, and hundreds of other viruses large parts of the population carry and live with? Not to mention all the bacteria and parasites that live inside and on us? One more persistent virus that doesn't cause disease in most people isn't going to make a hell of a lot of difference. HIV should hurry up and evolve already.
By contrast, a disease that produces symptoms immediately is easily detectable and the host seeks treatment. If it is really really fast, they die before they can pass it on, and such diseases quickly eradicate themselves.
Which is why evolution selects against them. You don't get a choice in the matter.
It could very well be that both sides are "irrationally biased".
There are no "both sides" to this. The world doesn't consist of Republicans and Democrats alone.
The fleeing felon rule isn't the automatic death sentence it used to be
How is that relevant? You correctly identified that most people's intuition is that Brown would have been indicted while Wilson was not, but you tried to imply some sort of injustice based on that. But there is no injustice. Given the facts as we know them, Brown would have been guilty of murder if he had killed Wilson in this confrontation, no matter what the circumstances were; killing a police officer is almost always murder, by law. On the other hand, police officers are given wide latitude and discretion in their use of deadly force, so there is nothing unusual or surprising about the fact that Wilson wasn't indicted. That's the law, in Ferguson and elsewhere. If you want to change it, vote.
But the ancestors of African-Americans didn't flee or immigrate, they were dragged kicking and screaming INTO persecution and not just for a single lifetime.
Where do you think slaves came from? By and large, the people who were "dragging them kicking and screaming" into slavery were black Africans themselves. Slaves were brought to the Americas not under US rule but under British rule. The slave masters in the colonies were largely a small elite of rich land owners. And the vast majority of white Americans today are descendants of people who either fought slavery or whose ancestors immigrated long after it, often fleeing enslavement and persecution themselves, starting with nothing in the US, and facing strong discrimination by earlier US settlers. Furthermore, many Africans have indeed immigrated to the US voluntarily since. Given these historical facts, the idea that you can assign responsibility to slavery based on a modern person's skin color is ludicrous.
And while slavery is a distant memory, persecution / segregation / etc. isn't.
But slavery is different from racism and segregation; the latter were evils primarily promoted and implemented by progressives more recently than slavery. The social problems among African Americans did not happen until long after the abolition of slavery, and they coincided with the rise of progressive policies. So, you can't blame a legacy of slavery for those problems, you have to blame first early 20th century progressive policies (segregation, eugenics), and then late 20th century progressive policies (preferences, welfare, drug war, etc.).
America proudly celebrates its history and traditions as defining its identity & character, loudly & proudly. Race relations is an integral part of that history, too - with blacks, natives, minorities in general.
Fabricating history is not that same thing as celebrating history.
As a gay man, do you give credit to anyone for your ability to live your life openly, assuming you do?
Of course: the millions of people (like myself) who came out to friends, family, and employers and dealt with the consequences. People who had the courage to say "if you don't like what I am, then our association is over, and it is your loss".
I don't know how much of that can be credited to conservatives & the GOP.
Nothing. Neither can it be credited to the Democrats, although Democrats are now trying to take credit for it after the fact. Your fundamental error is in believing that social progress is possible only through government action.
Since you're much closer to the rightwing political machine who are apparently free of racial divisiveness,
Oh, knock off the stupid. I'm an independent. Calling out Democrats on their racism and their harmful policies does
I wanted to know how to votes were cast to see if the GRAND JURY might have made their decision because of racial bias - by either side.
You couldn't determine "racial bias" from the votes of 12 jurors even if you knew: first, the sample is too small, and second, you simply have no independent way of judging which group was irrationally biased, the white jurors or the black jurors.
Those people in the street weren't protesting because of being whipped up by the mainstream media or the progressives or the Democrats
Protesters are a vanishingly small number compared to African Americans in this country; the people who go out on the street have no political legitimacy.
If you want to know what the African Americans in Ferguson actually believe government should look like, look at voting: only about 7% of Ferguson's black population bothers to vote in local elections, and there have been only 128 new voter registrations since Michael Brown's death. Obviously, political change isn't particularly high on the agenda of the African American population of Ferguson.
How likely is it that Brown doesn't have to go to trial and the case against him is thrown out by the grand jury?
That's a false equivalence. Depending on circumstances, threatening a police officer or even fleeing from a police officer are sufficient justification for the police officer to use deadly force; that's the law and has always been the law. Brown should have gone to trial and been locked up for many years even if Wilson had managed to take him into custody.
And even if you argue that Mike Brown had it coming, you can't say that about every one of their dead kids & relatives. Did Tamir Rice have it coming? Or Akai Gurley? Or Aiyana Jones? Or Amadou Diallo? Or Sean Bell?
What's your point? That police sometimes make mistakes, that they are sometimes corrupt, and that they are somtimes sociopaths? Yes, they are. But that has little to do with race per se.
they were there because it's a regular part of their reality going back generations. It may be better than the bad old days but it's still very much the norm.
So what? My family fled persecution and lost everything and nobody gives a f*ck, nor should they. And I'm a gay man, that's been part of my everyday reality. We all have our individual histories and deal with them as best we can. But when it comes to race, you all of a sudden see and treat 50 million individuals as an amorphous "they". It's you who reduces people to their skin color, not me.
That said, at the time, the South was very much a Democrat stronghold. Times have turned and so have cloaks.
I don't know what "times have turned and so have cloaks" is even supposed to mean or what the relevance of that is. Fact is that Democrats, progressives, and you continue to divide people up, and reason about politics, based on a meaningless and fictitious concept of "race". You derive political legitimacy for politicians from the color of their skin, construct historical fables based on race, and assign guilt and responsibility based on nothing other than skin color. That's not just irrational and morally wrong, it is also ineffective and even harmful when it becomes the basis of government policy.
And you're still very reactionary but I imagine namecalling makes you feel better.
I don't mean "racist" as name calling, I mean it as a simple factual statement: you advocate government policies that give preferences based on the arbitrary and ill-defined criterion of "race".
I understand your mindset. You think that if your intentions in making racial distinctions are good, it's not really "racism". You imagine that "Southerners" and "Republicans" are the real racists because you think they want to arbitrarily deny rights to African Americans because they are bigoted and prejudiced. I used to believe that too, but it simply doesn't fit history or political reality.
But it's telling that you smear modern Democrats with policies that they've long since discarded, at great political cost.
Back when Democrats were following those old racist policies, they thought they were doing something good for both blacks and whites. It was only later that Democrats decided that those policies were bad after all, but that they were now going to adopt a different set of racially discriminatory policies to help blacks. And in another 50 years, when people will have figured out how destructive current progressive and Democratic racial policies have been, they will then "discard" and disavow their current racist policies and come up with yet another set of racist policies. And true to form, Democrats and progressives justify all of this with reams of scientific data, just like they always have.
The error there is not in trying to help black people, the error progressives and Democrats keep making is in believing that they can fix society by looking at social science research and then deriving effective policies from it to improve society. The past 50 years and the plight of the black community under progressive policies shows that that approach is not working.
If you're searching for the old racists Democrats you miss so much, you're looking in the wrong place
I'm looking in exactly the right place. Progressives and Democrats are advocating that government classify people by race and treat them differently according to their race. And while you delude yourself into believing that you are doing it for the best of motives and to help blacks, in practice, it condemns blacks to lives of poverty and misery. While the details of the racist policies of progressives and Democrats have changed, the ideology and reasoning underlying that racism remains the same.
Believe me, I know where you are coming from: I used to be a Democrat and progressive myself until I actually read up on the history. I think the Republican party sucks. But the issue here isn't the Republican party, it's Democrats and progressives who still want to use arbitrary racial labels to divide up the population.
If you're into dumping skills without much practical economic value, why stop with handwriting? Why not dump Finnish, clearly little more than a cultural affectation and anachronism, and convert the entire country to English (or perhaps German or Russian)? Surely little Finnish workers would be a lot more productive if they didn't have to waste their time learning two languages.
I'm someone who doesn't live in the rightwing fantasy that America is post-racial.
America is clearly not post-racial: segregation, eugenics, forced sterilization, and other divisive and racist policies were policies promoted primarily by progressives and Democrats. Post 1960's, progressives have continued their racist policies in more subtle ways but ways that are just as harmful.
America will never be post-racial as long as entire political empires are built on keeping African Americans angry and in poverty. America will never be post-racial as long as racist thinking like yours and that of Democrats prevails in politics.
"Seated in a fair & representative way" - How do you justify that? Ferguson is 68% African-American yet the grand jury was 75% white?
The jury is representative of the county, not of the town. Its members are drawn randomly.
Of course, even if the jury were drawn from Ferguson, there is still a 1:3 chance that it would end up majority white, and about a 2% chance that it ends up 75% white. That's because race doesn't matter in jury selection, and it shouldn't matter.
What you should really be asking is how representative the hooligans, criminals and looters are of the people of Ferguson, and the answer is: clearly not very much. Ferguson is a tool for Democratic politicians and associated "civil rights leaders" to advance their own careers, and they don't care how many African Americans the f*ck over in the process.
"publicly available evidence, there is no way it could have rationally reached a different conclusion from the one it reached" - I'd still like to know how the voting went. Was it unanimous in Darren Wilson's favor? Was it 50-50? One vote short of proceeding to indictment? Did the members vote along racial lines?
These delusions indicate that you need to go back on your medications.
Accusing people who disagree with you politically of mental illness is another hallmark of totalitarians, fascists, and communists. Thanks for going on demonstrating who you really are.
A politically motivated public trial is exactly what grand juries are supposed to prevent, because dragging citizens through the court because the mob wants to see blood or some politician wants to make a name for himself is not justice. People like you is why we have a grand jury system in the first place. I'm glad it's working as intended.
Slashdot Mirror
Wakefield made generic and nonsensical claims about dangers of vaccines. People now respond with generic and nonsensical claims about the benefits of vaccines. Both sides are wrong. You have to look at vaccines one at a time to determine whether they are safe and effective.
Each vaccine mandate should require a separate, public debate and separate legislative act because establishing the principle that government can mandate citizens to inject arbitrary proteins into their body without legislative action is fundamentally wrong.
By your reasoning, we might as well turn ourselves into a totalitarian superstate. After all, all the freedoms we have day-to-day are just an "illusion" anyway since under exceptional circumstances, they could be taken away.
This debate isn't about health or religion, it's about power. You can see this by noting that the debate isn't weighing the cost and benefits for specific vaccines, it's about vaccine requirements in general, requirements that can likely be increased simply through regulation based on the vote of some panel. It's about whether society can force you to have substances injected into every citizen because a few government experts decide that it's the right thing to do.
Sometimes we don't have a choice to force people to do things with their body against their will, but that is an extreme measure. A much simpler way of achieving the same goal is to give individual employers, schools, towns, and communities the right and ability to require documentation of vaccination to allow your presence on premises. That achieves pretty much the same goal as a universal vaccination requirement, but it is far less draconian.
Although such restrictions achieve pretty much the same goal, they are rooted in the principle of freedom of association. Freedom of association is a good principle that we should uphold because it's a democratic and distributed principle of government. The principle that government can inject stuff into anybody's body at any time because some panel says it's a good thing to do is a bad principle, because it is centralized and prone to abuse.
(Forced vaccination is also not all that effective in achieving what its proponents claim. If you are in a population with a suppressed immune system, widespread vaccination will not protect you from disease, for the reason the article mentions: vaccinations are not completely effective anyway, and outbreaks happen even in completely vaccinated populations. In addition, there are many other diseases we can't vaccinated against. So, anybody at risk needs to control their exposure to other people anyway and no vaccination mandate is going to change that.)
Although voting third party may be a last resort, you should really pay more attention to primaries in either party. The differences between primary candidates within a party are often as big if not bigger than between parties.
You seem to want to have it both ways, first arguing that foreign workers are less efficient, and then arguing that they are less expensive for the same work.
If they are less efficient, then we don't need visa rules because companies won't hire them; Microsoft knows better than USCIS what kind of workers Microsoft needs.
If foreign workers are both willing and able to do the same work as American workers for less money, then keeping them out of the country won't help, because they will simply compete with American workers from overseas, usually with lower overhead and less regulation to boot.
If you impose both tariffs on products and restrict the movement of labor, you do indeed raise the salary of US workers, but it doesn't help because prices also rise, and in addition you lose the benefits of comparative advantage.
So, I don't see how any of what you say translates into "we must restrict H-1b visas" or "we must have wage tariffs"; generally, restricting or taxing either the movement of goods or of labor makes society worse off overall, although special interests may benefit.
The British got rid of it because they didn't need slaves anymore; mechanization had created an impoverished and desperate underclass that was much easier to exploit without the responsibilities that come along with owning slaves. And racism and oppression continued to be government policies in much of the European colonial empires until the 20th century.
I have seen no evidence that there is substantial racial discrimination in law enforcement; there are only racial disparities.
Well, we don't have any such policies, so that's a hypothetical point.
There are two senses of racism, yours and mine.
Yours is the modern one of Democrats and progressives, which roughly amounts to: "doesn't agree with the favorable treatment we want to give to African Americans in order to make up for past mistreatment". To you, race-blind government is racist.
Mine is the simple and logical one, namely: discriminates in government policies based on race. To me, any discrimination based on race is racism, for the simple reason that "race" just isn't a valid concept. There is no such thing as a "Caucasian" or an "African American"; those are arbitrary categories people sort themselves into for various cultural reasons.
Now, the second error people like you make is that you think that people like me take our position out of greed; you think that we don't want to give special treatment to African Americans because it would mean we need to make sacrifices or give up privileges. But the actual reason is that the supposedly favorable treatment you want to give to blacks is actually hurting them, and this is nothing new. The racism of Democrats and progressives has been justified for more than a century by helping African Americans (and they have genuinely believed that that's what they were doing, just like you are), and it has always hurt them.
In fact, the attitude can be traced back to colonialism, in which the British, French, and Spanish also justified colonialism and brutal oppression by saying that they were actually helping the lesser races.
I'm sorry you keep viewing our exchange as a trading of insults. It's not. I'm simply telling you to reflect on what you are saying.
We have been getting rid of tariffs on goods because they are little more than corporate welfare and because they hurt Americans, in particular low income Americans.
Even if that were true, it wouldn't change anything. If the IT industry can't find US workers to do these jobs at the wages they want to pay, they either move the jobs overseas or get out of that business entirely because they can't compete with overseas businesses. What "wage tariffs" don't accomplish is getting more US IT workers more and higher paying jobs.
The only way US workers get higher paying jobs (and that also means better benefits and better security) than overseas workers is by actually being better. If an overseas worker can immigrate and replace you, you simply aren't worth more than that overseas worker. Having a US passport doesn't entitle you to a wage premium, much as you may feel you are entitled to it.
How does voluntarily taking a severance package amount to "being silenced"? Don't like the non-disparagement clause? Don't take the money.
The revolutionaries were well aware of the injustice of slavery. But they were also well aware that the revolution wouldn't have been successful if they had pushed for that as part of the revolution itself. I suggest you read up on the French and German revolutions to see what happened with revolutions that bit off more than they could chew, and the bloodshed that resulted.
You're just bullshitting without facts or even a clear idea of what you are saying.
I have no idea what "equal ENFORCEMENT" is even supposed to mean. The distinction in US politics is equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. You advocate equality of outcome, which, although you seem incapable of grasping this, is a racist policy.
Well, yes, you accuse anybody of racism who doesn't subscribe to your twisted racial ideologies. That is another common thread throughout the history of progressivism and fascism. I suppose an attack and accusation is the best defense, isn't it?
In different words, I frankly don't care anymore whether people like you call me a racist, a misogynist, or a homophobe. You have misused and tainted those terms to the point that they have become meaningless.
Again, the question isn't why this particular probe wasn't using RTGs, the question is whether, as an engineering solution, RTGs would work for this kind of probe. And the answer is that RTGs are vastly superior to other power sources for almost any probe of almost any size. If there wasn't so much political b.s. surrounding RTGs, they would be cheap and easily available.
Frankly, I'm not sure it's worth even bothering with a long range space program if we don't use RTGs; other power sources are so short-lived that we are paying orders of magnitude more than we should for the scientific data that our probes yield.
As I was saying: the biases of the grand jury are nobody's business and not subject to public scrutiny.
That is completely irrelevant since I'm not trying to imply an equivalence between slavery in Africa and slavery in the Americas.
What I am saying is that ideas about history are fundamentally wrong. Black Africans were enslaved by other black Africans and shipped to the Americas by European colonial powers (and most of them not to North America). Furthermore, the vast majority of white Americans today are descendants of people who either fought slavery or had nothing to do with slavery at all. Even if the concept of inherited guilt were valid, the vast majority of white Americans have inherited no guilt related to slavery.
European aristocracies didn't need to import slaves or have separate slavery laws because they effectively owned all the human beings within their domains. You're right: those systems of human ownership weren't ended by civil wars, they were ended by revolutions.
European revolutions were motivated by self-interest of the oppressed, often related to starvation and brutal oppression. In the US, the vast majority of Union soldiers were volunteers, making personal sacrifices in order to liberate oppressed people in the South. Which one is more noble? Putting your life at risk because you want to improve your own situation, or putting your life at risk to help others?
Fortunately, most Americans are not your kind of evil bastard who thinks that individual rights are things granted by majority whim. Most people in the US still realize that the US is a society based on laws and the protection of individual liberties, even for individuals that one disagrees with.
Which part of Republicans is largely indistinguishable from the left wing political machine of the Democrats; they simply choose different groups to be corrupted by. did you not understand? I don't blame "the ills of American society" on Democrats, I point out specifically that Democrats and progressives have a long history of racism and that that history continues today.
Bullshit. What we need is equal protection under the law, nothing more, and we got that.
Your example isn't reasonable. As a virus evolves, disease doesn't just take longer to manifest itself, it also becomes milder in the process and manifests in fewer people. That's why I gave the examples of those other viruses; they are a roadmap of how HIV will likely evolve. And yes, that is a good thing.
Saying "you'd rather stop" is a false dichotomy: you don't have the choice. In addition, wasting resources on viruses that cause less serious and less frequent disease means people suffer and die unnecessarily.
You mean like HPV, HSV, EBV, CMV, and hundreds of other viruses large parts of the population carry and live with? Not to mention all the bacteria and parasites that live inside and on us? One more persistent virus that doesn't cause disease in most people isn't going to make a hell of a lot of difference. HIV should hurry up and evolve already.
Which is why evolution selects against them. You don't get a choice in the matter.
There are no "both sides" to this. The world doesn't consist of Republicans and Democrats alone.
How is that relevant? You correctly identified that most people's intuition is that Brown would have been indicted while Wilson was not, but you tried to imply some sort of injustice based on that. But there is no injustice. Given the facts as we know them, Brown would have been guilty of murder if he had killed Wilson in this confrontation, no matter what the circumstances were; killing a police officer is almost always murder, by law. On the other hand, police officers are given wide latitude and discretion in their use of deadly force, so there is nothing unusual or surprising about the fact that Wilson wasn't indicted. That's the law, in Ferguson and elsewhere. If you want to change it, vote.
Where do you think slaves came from? By and large, the people who were "dragging them kicking and screaming" into slavery were black Africans themselves. Slaves were brought to the Americas not under US rule but under British rule. The slave masters in the colonies were largely a small elite of rich land owners. And the vast majority of white Americans today are descendants of people who either fought slavery or whose ancestors immigrated long after it, often fleeing enslavement and persecution themselves, starting with nothing in the US, and facing strong discrimination by earlier US settlers. Furthermore, many Africans have indeed immigrated to the US voluntarily since. Given these historical facts, the idea that you can assign responsibility to slavery based on a modern person's skin color is ludicrous.
But slavery is different from racism and segregation; the latter were evils primarily promoted and implemented by progressives more recently than slavery. The social problems among African Americans did not happen until long after the abolition of slavery, and they coincided with the rise of progressive policies. So, you can't blame a legacy of slavery for those problems, you have to blame first early 20th century progressive policies (segregation, eugenics), and then late 20th century progressive policies (preferences, welfare, drug war, etc.).
Fabricating history is not that same thing as celebrating history.
Of course: the millions of people (like myself) who came out to friends, family, and employers and dealt with the consequences. People who had the courage to say "if you don't like what I am, then our association is over, and it is your loss".
Nothing. Neither can it be credited to the Democrats, although Democrats are now trying to take credit for it after the fact. Your fundamental error is in believing that social progress is possible only through government action.
Oh, knock off the stupid. I'm an independent. Calling out Democrats on their racism and their harmful policies does
You couldn't determine "racial bias" from the votes of 12 jurors even if you knew: first, the sample is too small, and second, you simply have no independent way of judging which group was irrationally biased, the white jurors or the black jurors.
Protesters are a vanishingly small number compared to African Americans in this country; the people who go out on the street have no political legitimacy.
If you want to know what the African Americans in Ferguson actually believe government should look like, look at voting: only about 7% of Ferguson's black population bothers to vote in local elections, and there have been only 128 new voter registrations since Michael Brown's death. Obviously, political change isn't particularly high on the agenda of the African American population of Ferguson.
That's a false equivalence. Depending on circumstances, threatening a police officer or even fleeing from a police officer are sufficient justification for the police officer to use deadly force; that's the law and has always been the law. Brown should have gone to trial and been locked up for many years even if Wilson had managed to take him into custody.
What's your point? That police sometimes make mistakes, that they are sometimes corrupt, and that they are somtimes sociopaths? Yes, they are. But that has little to do with race per se.
So what? My family fled persecution and lost everything and nobody gives a f*ck, nor should they. And I'm a gay man, that's been part of my everyday reality. We all have our individual histories and deal with them as best we can. But when it comes to race, you all of a sudden see and treat 50 million individuals as an amorphous "they". It's you who reduces people to their skin color, not me.
I don't know what "times have turned and so have cloaks" is even supposed to mean or what the relevance of that is. Fact is that Democrats, progressives, and you continue to divide people up, and reason about politics, based on a meaningless and fictitious concept of "race". You derive political legitimacy for politicians from the color of their skin, construct historical fables based on race, and assign guilt and responsibility based on nothing other than skin color. That's not just irrational and morally wrong, it is also ineffective and even harmful when it becomes the basis of government policy.
I don't mean "racist" as name calling, I mean it as a simple factual statement: you advocate government policies that give preferences based on the arbitrary and ill-defined criterion of "race".
I understand your mindset. You think that if your intentions in making racial distinctions are good, it's not really "racism". You imagine that "Southerners" and "Republicans" are the real racists because you think they want to arbitrarily deny rights to African Americans because they are bigoted and prejudiced. I used to believe that too, but it simply doesn't fit history or political reality.
I didn't say that the problem was "only" Democrats and progressives. African Americans clearly face many other problems.
Well, your eyes certainly haven't been opened, because you clearly still are a racist through and through.
Back when Democrats were following those old racist policies, they thought they were doing something good for both blacks and whites. It was only later that Democrats decided that those policies were bad after all, but that they were now going to adopt a different set of racially discriminatory policies to help blacks. And in another 50 years, when people will have figured out how destructive current progressive and Democratic racial policies have been, they will then "discard" and disavow their current racist policies and come up with yet another set of racist policies. And true to form, Democrats and progressives justify all of this with reams of scientific data, just like they always have.
The error there is not in trying to help black people, the error progressives and Democrats keep making is in believing that they can fix society by looking at social science research and then deriving effective policies from it to improve society. The past 50 years and the plight of the black community under progressive policies shows that that approach is not working.
I'm looking in exactly the right place. Progressives and Democrats are advocating that government classify people by race and treat them differently according to their race. And while you delude yourself into believing that you are doing it for the best of motives and to help blacks, in practice, it condemns blacks to lives of poverty and misery. While the details of the racist policies of progressives and Democrats have changed, the ideology and reasoning underlying that racism remains the same.
Believe me, I know where you are coming from: I used to be a Democrat and progressive myself until I actually read up on the history. I think the Republican party sucks. But the issue here isn't the Republican party, it's Democrats and progressives who still want to use arbitrary racial labels to divide up the population.
If you're into dumping skills without much practical economic value, why stop with handwriting? Why not dump Finnish, clearly little more than a cultural affectation and anachronism, and convert the entire country to English (or perhaps German or Russian)? Surely little Finnish workers would be a lot more productive if they didn't have to waste their time learning two languages.
America is clearly not post-racial: segregation, eugenics, forced sterilization, and other divisive and racist policies were policies promoted primarily by progressives and Democrats. Post 1960's, progressives have continued their racist policies in more subtle ways but ways that are just as harmful.
America will never be post-racial as long as entire political empires are built on keeping African Americans angry and in poverty. America will never be post-racial as long as racist thinking like yours and that of Democrats prevails in politics.
It's not a "racist card". Objectively, you believe that race should be taken into account in these matters, and that makes you a racist.
The jury is representative of the county, not of the town. Its members are drawn randomly.
Of course, even if the jury were drawn from Ferguson, there is still a 1:3 chance that it would end up majority white, and about a 2% chance that it ends up 75% white. That's because race doesn't matter in jury selection, and it shouldn't matter.
What you should really be asking is how representative the hooligans, criminals and looters are of the people of Ferguson, and the answer is: clearly not very much. Ferguson is a tool for Democratic politicians and associated "civil rights leaders" to advance their own careers, and they don't care how many African Americans the f*ck over in the process.
That's because you're a racist.
I found all the characters and political groupings in Star Wars unlikable. Go ahead, kill each other, see if I care.
Accusing people who disagree with you politically of mental illness is another hallmark of totalitarians, fascists, and communists. Thanks for going on demonstrating who you really are.
A politically motivated public trial is exactly what grand juries are supposed to prevent, because dragging citizens through the court because the mob wants to see blood or some politician wants to make a name for himself is not justice. People like you is why we have a grand jury system in the first place. I'm glad it's working as intended.