Beware of being led by emotions. They seldom lead to good decisions. To reason alone must be one's first master.
Scott Adams, who you might know as the Dilbert creator, has been saying for a while that humans make decisions on emotions and facts don't matter much or any. In fact, he argues that appealing to reason and laying out facts is actually counterproductive when faced with an opponent who appeals to emotions. I am beginning to wonder with some concern that he might be right.
I read him for a while (before I found him too frustrating).
When it comes to politics I believe people are rarely selecting based on individual policy, rather they're selecting candidates who they trust to make good decisions.
Recent studies have shown that if you take someone who holds a wrong belief or opinion and you can prove with evidence that the opinion is wrong, most people will actually double down and cling more stubbornly to the wrong belief.
I think those studies are misinterpreted. In the short term people double down, that is rational behaviour because they're not able to properly evaluate those arguments on the fly. It's in the long term that they start coming to trust the new evidence.
This is part of why Trump appeals to so many people. A lot of what he is says is very simple emotional arguments. Hillary has been trying to get off the facts in her speech and get more emotional as a result of this. Don't be surprised if the first debate has very little in the way of concrete ideas and a whole lot of name calling directed at the other person. People will complain that it lacks substance, but it may just be that humans in general are pretty stupid and we're just getting what we deserve with a bunch of name calling because we ignore the substance when we're given it.
They're backing Trump for two reasons.
First they assume his money means he is highly competent, so even if he's making dumb policy statements they assume he'll make great policy if he puts his mind to it.
Second they're really uncomfortable with the growing diversity of the US, Trump's only consistent policy direction is to start reversing that growing diversity, those are decisions they trust Trump to make.
You're literally making the argument that Trump can't be racist because he has black friends.
Forget Trump for a second. Can someone, seriously, explain to me why this isn't a valid argument? I keep seeing this exact line being trotted out to shoot down claims of not being racist.
If you're racist, and antagonistic to another race, then how the fuck do you manage to make friends of that race? I would think that having friends of that race is in fact valid evidence against claims of racism.
Not trolling, I seriously do not understand this line of thinking. Can someone please present a rational argument to support this, or should we just accept handwave dismissals of contradictory evidence?
Suppose I believe black people are by nature stupid, lazy, and violent. That would make me a racist.
Then one day I get a black co-worker, and over the course of a few weeks I discover this black person is brilliant, hard-working, and gentle, and we become good friends.
I'm still a racist.
I haven't changed my beliefs, I still believe the average black person is stupid, lazy, and violent. I just think my one black friend an exception to the rule.
Hillarie's many instances of deeply held racism are easy/ to find if you search just a little.
Not really.
Of that list of 11 items, 1 is racist (if it happened, 40 years ago), 2 is racist, though somewhat of a legitimate mistake in the middle of a bad crime wave, and she repented.
The rest are bombed jokes or comments where they're trying really hard to erase the context and nuance.
Trump on the other hand his blasting his dog whistle like a bull-horn.
Of course I don't know if Trump is racist or just exploiting racism for political gain, but it's racism.
Since you appear to be too stupid to understand my comment (which is of course to be expected from someone only able to play the race card in place of real argument), it's not that he has black friends and supporters (though that in itself is an indicator)
There are 10's of millions of black people in the US, I'm sure David Duke could find black supporters if he wanted them.
- it's that in actions taken over a long period at times when he was not running for office, he did not act against people based on color (or indeed gender). Real people are judged by actions, not just words or the words especially of others that hate them.
And it's only a very extreme racist who won't have friends of an ethnicity at all, modern racism is found in the form of stereotypes, different standards for other groups, and singling out or judging groups based on ethnicity.
If you are also so stupid as to equate the federal government investigating the actions of a company with the actions of using a nuclear arsenal against another nation;
I'm seriously unsure what the hell you're talking about.
if indeed you are that stupid who can be blamed but yourself, possibly your parents?
I'm seriously amused you followed up a weird random sentence with this.
But you've had long enough to correct any misapprehensions they might have fed you, so your delusions are of your own peculiar brand, or more likely fed to you by the rich eco-chamber that is the modern liberal press and parroting supporters.
With any luck, perhaps time you may be able to think for yourself once more, rather than simply vomited what is fed to you by your masters.
I'll let you have the last word, as the delusional people will chatter on so and I am busy with real work and life.
but don't you want to let in 600,000 more refugees?
what's another 60,000 jihadis? Nothing bad will happen letting them in
60,000? Were you planning to set up a recruiting booth inside a Daesh training camp? Daesh might not even have 60,000 fighters world-wide.
Let in 600,000 refugees and you might get a handful who turn jihadi.
You'll get another handful who commit murder, some others who steal cars, start businesses, become political pundits, stand up comics, teachers, professors, drug addicts, you'll even get a few Trump supporters!
It's 600,000 people, you're likely to get a bit of everything, good and bad.
And frankly lets be honest, you don't actually give a crap about terrorism.
Anyone who gives it a moments thought realizes the US already has a lot of Muslims, and the easiest way to get a bunch of Muslim terrorists in the US is to elect Trump and essentially declare Muslims to be the enemy.
So no, I don't think you're that stupid, I don't think you would have the same reaction if these were western European white Christians.
Rather it's about race and culture, the US with an additional 600K Arab Muslims is a smidgen less like the US as you envision it.
And if that's your true motivation then it's the argument we should be having.
When it comes to free speech, I'd still rather them be in charge than just about anyone else.
You're assuming the US has a choice.
A lot of other countries don't particularly like the idea of the US being in charge of this global resources, and they are already preparing their own root DNS servers. It's not that hard, mirror the current root node and then start forking. Maybe do a bit of censorship, maybe make sure nothing resolves to google.com without a giant cheque.
International governance doesn't make the problem go away, censorship already exists to a degree, but it makes it politically easier to keep everyone on the same network.
I don't agree with everything Trump wants to do It's pretty obvious to anyone that knows anything Trumps position is way better for the internet than turning it over to an international panel that can start censoring the hell out of it.
Trump is infamous for his proclivity for suing people and desire to use libel law against critics. If the Internet were governed by the US under a Trump administration I think you'd here a lot of grumbling from his administration about doing something about websites that are being unfair to Trump or the administration.
He's already threatened to use the power of the presidency to go after Amazon because Bezos owns the Washington Post and it's been mean to him.
Trump is far less racist than Hillary (just look at past Hillary remarks like arriving late because she was on "Colored People Time").
It wasn't even intentionally racist, it was supposed to be a joke about a politician inadvertently saying something racist (which they ironically did).
I thought Trumpites understood the good "Hillary is a racist" stuff is back in the mid-90s with all the super-predator stuff, you really need to catch up on your twitter.
Trump chose a black woman to win and work with on the Apprentice - sure it's a TV show but she did work for him and supports him, as do a number of prominent black celebrities.
You're literally making the argument that Trump can't be racist because he has black friends.
Trump also wanted to cooler evaluate NATO commitments before taking action,
He seemingly wants to extort allies into paying the US for protection, I say seemingly because he doesn't have coherent foreign policy.
and yet the media portrays him as a warmonger. Why?
Because he's generally really quick to call for military action and to call for major war crimes like stealing other countries natural resources, up until the military action turns out poorly. And then he hops in a time machine and goes back to change his mind.
Then I'm sorry to tell you your feelings are wrong.
You're free to prefer Trump for a variety of reasons of your choosing.
But to suggest he's more honest than Hillary? That's factually incorrect.
Clinton, even if you think she's lying about a few key things (like her knowledge of confidential emails, forgetting security warnings), her lies are only about key subjects, have a definite utility, and are relatively hard to disprove.
Trump on the other hand lies constantly about almost everything and lies about a lot of things that are trivially disproven. He lies about his charitable donations, lies about his past positions, lies about statements he made on tape, lies about reasons for not releasing his tax returns, he even lies about his hair!
If you want to support Trump, go ahead, there are lots of reasons you can offer and I'll probably disagree with almost all of them, but they could be your non-disprovable opinion.
But to suggest that Clinton is as remotely as dishonest, you might as well proclaim the world is flat, WWE is real, or Dane Cook is funny. These aren't mathematically verifiable facts (well not all of them), but they're about as close as you can get.
My personal experience is, activities in the morning are more effective for weight loss. I used to walk ~4km in the evening for more than a year, but did not result in weight loss. But when switched to morning walk, I could see results in couple of months.
Did you walk before or after supper? If it was after supper perhaps you just convinced yourself that you worked up an appetite and ate enough calories to compensate for the walk.
With the morning walk if you walked before breakfast you probably didn't increase consumption to compensate, and if it was after you were probably satisfied enough to wait for lunch.
In either case the determining factor was more likely a mental one then a biological one.
Probably it has something to do with glucose/sugar levels
She has a plan. It's the same plan that she always uses. As Peggy Noonan recently wrote, the Clinton Scandal Ritual is to:
Lie, deny, revise, claim not to remember specifics, stall for time. When it passes, call the story “old news” full of questions that have already been answered. “As I’ve repeatedly said . ..”
That's every politician's plan, Obama dealing with Reverent Wright is one of the only examples of a politician dealing with a scandal head on, everyone else just stays low key and waits until something else catches the media's attention.
Clinton's problem is that there's an election campaign so there's nothing else interesting going on besides Clinton v. Trump. As long as no other Clinton news comes up the media is going to talk about emails.
She just needs to start flooding the airwaves with press conferences until everyone finds something else to talk about and moves on.
It's quite possible, and it's possible that he's picked up some of the racially charged beliefs of his "team".
Being on the left I know I have to fight the urge to negatively stereotype blue collar workers and poor rural folk who could be categorized as "rednecks".
Holy Shit. Talking point central there. Do you get your "ammunition" from Daily Kos or straight from Soros?
I got it from watching the news. But even if I did get it from talking points so what? Just because an argument has been repeated doesn't make it wrong, talking points are only an issue when they're misleading or when the speaker is just repeating them and doesn't really understand.
The problem in US politics isn't the reliance on talking points, it's too many people saying too many different dumb things. If they actually stuck to the same talking points debunking them would be a lot easier.
It's an example extra layer of scrutiny applied only when the candidate is black. One only needs see the relative disinterest with which the birthers treated the fact that the exact scenario they were speculating about applied directly to Cruz.
Said a judge of Mexican heritage wasn't fit to judge him due to his heritage.
I did ask for actual quotes didn't I? And yet, you chose to paraphrase... What are you trying to slip here, uhm?
Nothing, I just don't want to waste time.
What Trump actually said, was that the judge — a Mexican racist himself ("La Raza" member) — may have a conflict of interest.
Which was dumb, despite the fact they kept confusing different "La Raza"s. But more to the point lots of white judges are members of ethnic professional groups, no one accuses them of being racist, so only making it an issue when it's a Mexican judge in a group for Mexican judges is racist.
If it is Ok to suspect, that an All-white jury may be unfair to a Black defendant, why is it "racist" to suspect, a Mexican may be unfair to a White one?
Judges, unlike juries, have specific training on how to deal with biases. And there's no reason to think that a Mexican would have a negative stereotype about a German.
Has proposed banning members of a religion from the US (very similar to racism).
Not racism. Stick to the topic.
Muslim and Arab are highly correlated, particularly in the minds of Islamaphobes.
Regularly stereotypes blacks "you've got nothing to lose", suggesting that they're one monolithic underclass.
He's not even talking to a black crowd, he's making his "outreach" to a white crowd.
Why is every Republican supposed to "disavow" Duke — except to play into the opponents trap of accepting some guilt (sort of like disavowing beating of one's wife)?
If you're explicitly asked about it? Yes.
If David Duke and other white supremacists have repeatedly and enthusiastically endorsed you unlike anyone else in decades? Definitely yes.
There's a reason Duke and the other white supremacists continue to support Trump so much, he refuses to convincingly say they're wrong.
It was a lot more BLM than anti-Semitism, the anger was the perception that the life of a black child was treated as secondary to the life of the white (and Jewish) driver who had killed him.
Yeah I did. And I unlike you realize the following -
1. stripping the email address was almost certainly at a minimum an attempt to hide the fact that she was using a private server for government emails. (Something which would have gotten a "normal" person fired if not charged with multiple felonies)
Except they already would have known she was using a private email address. That was the reason for the document request in the first place.
More likely it would be the case that they didn't want her email address on the thousands of pages of printouts they sent, maybe Clinton was hoping that the address wouldn't be published and she could keep using it.
It would be like a phone number, the moment it's published it's pretty much useless and you need to update everyone with your new contact info.
2. stripping/altering the email address would have allowed them to cherry pick items - e.g. "well this email is potentially a problem, good thing it doesn't have clinton's email address on it!"
3. Later actions by the IT consultant (destroying evidence which was under subpoena) indicate the above was not simply "oooh we want to protect her private email address" rather it indicates they were looking at hiding or destroying the information.....
Possibly, though this guy talking about his "VERY VIP" client doesn't seem particularly suited to the uber-competent cloak and dagger world.
And the nuking actually makes a lot of sense if you think you've gotten everything you're legally supposed to.
At that point she's under no legal obligation to keep her remaining non-work emails, but the moment someone thinks to subpoena them she has to keep them around and they become at risk of public disclosure.
If I was faced with the possibility of my enemies getting a copy of my personal inbox I'd launch my hard drive into the sun.
OTOH Trump doesn't hide that he's a flagrant racist and that's totally cool.
Donald Trump does not hide it, that's true. That's because he, by all appearances, is not racist.
But, if you accuse him of racism, you have ample evidence, don't you? Let's see it, shall we? Be sure, though, to include only the things Trump actually said or did — not somebody else paraphrasing and otherwise engaging in hearsay...
Spent years suggesting that a black president wasn't born in the US, despite a ton of excellent evidence to the contrary.
Said a judge of Mexican heritage wasn't fit to judge him due to his heritage.
While speaking about illegal immigrants has focused pretty exclusively on those of Mexican ethnicity, has also engaged in broad (and inaccurate) generalizations about that group.
Has proposed banning members of a religion from the US (very similar to racism).
Regularly stereotypes blacks "you've got nothing to lose", suggesting that they're one monolithic underclass.
Extreme reluctance to reject or disavow David Duke or other white supremacists, same with racist memes he happens to retweet (accidental or not).
Now I don't know if he's personally racist or now, but many of the things he says and does are quite racist.
Why are they "accused" of jacking the price? "Described as" jacking the price would be a statement made in a moral society. In case any one forgot, Communism is the immoral social order.
Capitalism is based on the buyer and seller both being able to make free and informed decisions and creating a fair market.
In an emergency the sellers who happened to hold scarce critical resources have a temporary monopoly, ie selling a bottle of water to a man dying of thirst.
In the long term you'll get a functional market again, but in the immediate term many of the assumptions that make free markets moral and fair are missing and you have a massive imbalance in power which is managed by social mores, not market forces.
In Capitalism, a surge in demand creates a bubble of supply by willing contributors and the price quickly collapses when the demand is met. And the reason this happens is because prices increase. If there were more people in need of rides than willing drivers, a price could be increased until everyone able to give a ride would be willing to give rides (even those who would never consider doing so otherwise).
Is there really a significant upsurge in the supply of Uber drivers during an emergency? My guess is no, that the major function of the surge is prioritizing, not increasing demand.
Supply and demand. Market is efficiently allocating scarce resources. Price increase will increase supply providing consumers with more of the scarce resource. It's a thing of beauty really.
I think this kind of thinking makes the same fundamental mistake as communism.
Your theory works great, it makes for a very efficient, productive, and fair system. The only problem is that people don't work the way you need them to work for your theory to succeed.
Price increases in an emergency will typically be perceived as companies taking advantage of a desperate customer, and customers will react with outrage.
There are really only two ways to deal with this.
First, try to convince the users that the price increase is fair and just. This is what they're doing now and they're apparently failing, maybe they'll succeed in the future but it's a tough job and they're currently failing.
Second, accept that they can't change human nature. Surge due to regular high demand (ie Saturday night) is probably something they can sell to customers and keep doing. But during an emergency? People aren't going to like that.
What they should do is still pay drivers the surge rate in an emergency, but only charge passengers the regular rate (or even free).
Sure it costs money but it's great PR, and big emergencies like that are rare enough that it won't be a serious monetary hit.
Keeping in touch and up to date with old friends? Social networks solved a lot of that.
Having visual conversations with distant relatives? Video chat solved that.
Getting lost? GPS navigation solved that.
Finding answers to factual questions? Search engines (kinda) solved that.
Giving public platforms to ordinary people? Blogs solved that.
Just try going back and living in the early 90's and see how you like it. Techies have addressed tons of real world problems, and come up with at least partial solutions to a lot of them. Naturally many remain and some new ones have arisen, we don't live in a utopia, but it's not like they've been doing nothing.
Without offering any opinion on whether what Snowden did was good, bad, or potato, my first though here is:
The odds that Snowden was given refuge in Russia without turning over 100% of what he took are about the same as the odds of him getting his pardon: zero.
Which is better than him putting it all up on the internet, I suppose. While I'm sure there's national security intelligence in that data dump of great interest to Russia, they will do their best (which is very good) to coerce him into not revealing any of that to anyone else.
Not necessarily. The point of intelligence is to gain international influence and leverage, but by harbouring Snowden and staying on good terms with him Russia is getting tons of both.
He's a very high profile and effective critic of the US's intelligence gathering activities, he gives Russia cover for their own massive human rights abuses, he makes Russia the good guy among a crowd that should be stringently opposed to them. I wouldn't be surprised if Wikileaks' good relationship with Russia was related to their treatment of Snowden. And the intel might not be that valuable anymore anyways. Since the day Snowden showed up in China I suspect the NSA has been trying to obsolete everything he took.
I mean I'm sure they'd still love the full dump, and maybe they got it, but I don't think one can overlook how valuable he is sitting unmolested in Moscow.
No one in Germany thought so, and they actually HAD curveball and said he was both unreliable and most likely a fraud Meanwhile, Blix and Ritter BOTH told us the stories were a lie. Powell, like any apparatchnik, protected the boss and lied.
They knew individual parts of the puzzle were a lie, they may not have realized the conclusion was also wrong.
Saddam having an active WMD program (at least wrt chemical weapons) made a lot of sense. He'd used them before to protect himself from Iran and suppress internal dissident. He even hinted that he did have WMDs since he wanted to scare away the Iranians.
My opinion at the time was three things. 1) Saddam probably had a WMD program. 2) Saddam was content to stay in Iraq and was not an imminent threat. 3) The desire to invade Iraq had very little to do WMDs or an immediate terrorism threat and was more a desire to remake the middle east.
The summary totally ignores Powell's extremely critical remarks about Hillary, her lies, manipulation, and the public exploitation of his name against his wishes.
A lie of omission is still a lie, and that you choose to ignore these facts makes them all the more critical to examine.
Funny, I didn't see him call her a liar. Here's the most critical remarks I found about her from the article:
Mr. Powell lamented that while he respected Mrs. Clinton, he would “rather not have to vote for her,” describing the Democratic presidential nominee as having “a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational.”
“H.R.C. could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it,” Mr. Powell wrote late last month, referring to Mrs. Clinton by her initials. “I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini-tantrum at a Hamptons party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these ‘character’ minefields.”
In December 2015, he told Condoleezza Rice, his successor at the State Department, that the Republican political attacks on Benghazi were “a stupid witch hunt” and wrote that “basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thought Libyans now love me and I am O.K. in this very vulnerable place.” He added that “blame also rests on his leaders and supporters back here,” including Mrs. Clinton.
A few months later, in a discussion about Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal, Mr. Powell lamented that “everything H.R.C. touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”
Oh, and of course his most critical remarks about Trump:
Mr. Powell wrote last month that Mr. Trump is “his own best enemy” and added: “I will speak out when I feel it appropriate and not after every idiot thing he says.”
“No need to debate it with you now, but Trump is a national disgrace and an international pariah,” Mr. Powell wrote in June, noting the criticism of Mr. Trump by several prominent conservatives. “He is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him.”
“Yup, the whole birther movement was racist,” Mr. Powell wrote. “That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim. As I have said before, ‘What if he was?’ Muslims are born as Americans everyday.”
Mr. Powell dismissed as completely ineffective Mr. Trump’s recent attempts to reach out to black voters, saying that the Republican nominee “takes us for idiots.”
“He can never overcome what he tried to do to Obama with his search for the birth certificate hoping to force Obama out of the presidency,” Mr. Powell wrote, saying to his aide, “You don’t fall for his false sincerity, I hope.”
“He appeals to the worst angels of the G.O.P. nature and poor white folks,”
So... are you sure you want the summary to go into his opinions on the candidates?
Even though he was an enthusiastic supporter of Obama.
This does not bode well.
One thing that's never made sense to me was his claim of being a Republican. He had very few Republican positions, and as Secretary of State, he was one of the most Left Wing members of the administration. The reason Iraq (and Afghanistan) went to hell in a handbasket was his influence - the idea of making nation-building a part of the mission was his idea, not just W's.
This is a novel strategy. How do you deal with the biggest US military disaster since Vietnam? Blame it on the people who opposed it!
If I recall that's the same strategy that was used for Vietnam as well.
No, it was wrong intelligence. Or else, why did UK, run by a Left wing government run by Tony Blair, back that? They could easily have told the US that Iraq had nothing, and that would have worked, but everybody's intelligence agencies seemed to suggest that Saddam had chemical and/or biological weapons
Sure, everybody thought Saddam had WMDs, but none of the intelligence agencies were certain and they didn't believe he was a threat.
I don't know how dubious Powell was of the evidence at the time, but the intelligence agents who produced it were very dubious. Powell gave the presentation he did because it was his job to push the administrations agenda and the administration really wanted war.
Slashdot Mirror
To paraphrase, Muslims aren't the problem. If you don't give them what they want they will become a problem!
Or more accurately, if you treat like your enemy they tend to become your enemy.
Beware of being led by emotions. They seldom lead to good decisions. To reason alone must be one's first master.
Scott Adams, who you might know as the Dilbert creator, has been saying for a while that humans make decisions on emotions and facts don't matter much or any. In fact, he argues that appealing to reason and laying out facts is actually counterproductive when faced with an opponent who appeals to emotions. I am beginning to wonder with some concern that he might be right.
I read him for a while (before I found him too frustrating).
When it comes to politics I believe people are rarely selecting based on individual policy, rather they're selecting candidates who they trust to make good decisions.
Recent studies have shown that if you take someone who holds a wrong belief or opinion and you can prove with evidence that the opinion is wrong, most people will actually double down and cling more stubbornly to the wrong belief.
I think those studies are misinterpreted. In the short term people double down, that is rational behaviour because they're not able to properly evaluate those arguments on the fly. It's in the long term that they start coming to trust the new evidence.
This is part of why Trump appeals to so many people. A lot of what he is says is very simple emotional arguments. Hillary has been trying to get off the facts in her speech and get more emotional as a result of this. Don't be surprised if the first debate has very little in the way of concrete ideas and a whole lot of name calling directed at the other person. People will complain that it lacks substance, but it may just be that humans in general are pretty stupid and we're just getting what we deserve with a bunch of name calling because we ignore the substance when we're given it.
They're backing Trump for two reasons.
First they assume his money means he is highly competent, so even if he's making dumb policy statements they assume he'll make great policy if he puts his mind to it.
Second they're really uncomfortable with the growing diversity of the US, Trump's only consistent policy direction is to start reversing that growing diversity, those are decisions they trust Trump to make.
You're literally making the argument that Trump can't be racist because he has black friends.
Forget Trump for a second. Can someone, seriously, explain to me why this isn't a valid argument? I keep seeing this exact line being trotted out to shoot down claims of not being racist.
If you're racist, and antagonistic to another race, then how the fuck do you manage to make friends of that race? I would think that having friends of that race is in fact valid evidence against claims of racism.
Not trolling, I seriously do not understand this line of thinking. Can someone please present a rational argument to support this, or should we just accept handwave dismissals of contradictory evidence?
Suppose I believe black people are by nature stupid, lazy, and violent. That would make me a racist.
Then one day I get a black co-worker, and over the course of a few weeks I discover this black person is brilliant, hard-working, and gentle, and we become good friends.
I'm still a racist.
I haven't changed my beliefs, I still believe the average black person is stupid, lazy, and violent. I just think my one black friend an exception to the rule.
Hillarie's many instances of deeply held racism are easy/ to find if you search just a little.
Not really.
Of that list of 11 items, 1 is racist (if it happened, 40 years ago), 2 is racist, though somewhat of a legitimate mistake in the middle of a bad crime wave, and she repented.
The rest are bombed jokes or comments where they're trying really hard to erase the context and nuance.
Trump on the other hand his blasting his dog whistle like a bull-horn.
Of course I don't know if Trump is racist or just exploiting racism for political gain, but it's racism.
Since you appear to be too stupid to understand my comment (which is of course to be expected from someone only able to play the race card in place of real argument), it's not that he has black friends and supporters (though that in itself is an indicator)
There are 10's of millions of black people in the US, I'm sure David Duke could find black supporters if he wanted them.
- it's that in actions taken over a long period at times when he was not running for office, he did not act against people based on color (or indeed gender). Real people are judged by actions, not just words or the words especially of others that hate them.
And it's only a very extreme racist who won't have friends of an ethnicity at all, modern racism is found in the form of stereotypes, different standards for other groups, and singling out or judging groups based on ethnicity.
If you are also so stupid as to equate the federal government investigating the actions of a company with the actions of using a nuclear arsenal against another nation;
I'm seriously unsure what the hell you're talking about.
if indeed you are that stupid who can be blamed but yourself, possibly your parents?
I'm seriously amused you followed up a weird random sentence with this.
But you've had long enough to correct any misapprehensions they might have fed you, so your delusions are of your own peculiar brand, or more likely fed to you by the rich eco-chamber that is the modern liberal press and parroting supporters.
With any luck, perhaps time you may be able to think for yourself once more, rather than simply vomited what is fed to you by your masters.
I'll let you have the last word, as the delusional people will chatter on so and I am busy with real work and life.
Ok thanks for that!
but don't you want to let in 600,000 more refugees?
what's another 60,000 jihadis? Nothing bad will happen letting them in
60,000? Were you planning to set up a recruiting booth inside a Daesh training camp? Daesh might not even have 60,000 fighters world-wide.
Let in 600,000 refugees and you might get a handful who turn jihadi.
You'll get another handful who commit murder, some others who steal cars, start businesses, become political pundits, stand up comics, teachers, professors, drug addicts, you'll even get a few Trump supporters!
It's 600,000 people, you're likely to get a bit of everything, good and bad.
And frankly lets be honest, you don't actually give a crap about terrorism.
Anyone who gives it a moments thought realizes the US already has a lot of Muslims, and the easiest way to get a bunch of Muslim terrorists in the US is to elect Trump and essentially declare Muslims to be the enemy.
So no, I don't think you're that stupid, I don't think you would have the same reaction if these were western European white Christians.
Rather it's about race and culture, the US with an additional 600K Arab Muslims is a smidgen less like the US as you envision it.
And if that's your true motivation then it's the argument we should be having.
When it comes to free speech, I'd still rather them be in charge than just about anyone else.
You're assuming the US has a choice.
A lot of other countries don't particularly like the idea of the US being in charge of this global resources, and they are already preparing their own root DNS servers. It's not that hard, mirror the current root node and then start forking. Maybe do a bit of censorship, maybe make sure nothing resolves to google.com without a giant cheque.
International governance doesn't make the problem go away, censorship already exists to a degree, but it makes it politically easier to keep everyone on the same network.
I don't agree with everything Trump wants to do It's pretty obvious to anyone that knows anything Trumps position is way better for the internet than turning it over to an international panel that can start censoring the hell out of it.
Trump is infamous for his proclivity for suing people and desire to use libel law against critics. If the Internet were governed by the US under a Trump administration I think you'd here a lot of grumbling from his administration about doing something about websites that are being unfair to Trump or the administration.
He's already threatened to use the power of the presidency to go after Amazon because Bezos owns the Washington Post and it's been mean to him.
Trump is far less racist than Hillary (just look at past Hillary remarks like arriving late because she was on "Colored People Time").
Wow, your evidence of Hillary's racism is a misremembered SNL sketch?
It wasn't even intentionally racist, it was supposed to be a joke about a politician inadvertently saying something racist (which they ironically did).
I thought Trumpites understood the good "Hillary is a racist" stuff is back in the mid-90s with all the super-predator stuff, you really need to catch up on your twitter.
Trump chose a black woman to win and work with on the Apprentice - sure it's a TV show but she did work for him and supports him, as do a number of prominent black celebrities.
You're literally making the argument that Trump can't be racist because he has black friends.
Trump also wanted to cooler evaluate NATO commitments before taking action,
He seemingly wants to extort allies into paying the US for protection, I say seemingly because he doesn't have coherent foreign policy.
and yet the media portrays him as a warmonger. Why?
Because he's generally really quick to call for military action and to call for major war crimes like stealing other countries natural resources, up until the military action turns out poorly. And then he hops in a time machine and goes back to change his mind.
I feel the exact same way about Hillary.
Then I'm sorry to tell you your feelings are wrong.
You're free to prefer Trump for a variety of reasons of your choosing.
But to suggest he's more honest than Hillary? That's factually incorrect.
Clinton, even if you think she's lying about a few key things (like her knowledge of confidential emails, forgetting security warnings), her lies are only about key subjects, have a definite utility, and are relatively hard to disprove.
Trump on the other hand lies constantly about almost everything and lies about a lot of things that are trivially disproven. He lies about his charitable donations, lies about his past positions, lies about statements he made on tape, lies about reasons for not releasing his tax returns, he even lies about his hair!
If you want to support Trump, go ahead, there are lots of reasons you can offer and I'll probably disagree with almost all of them, but they could be your non-disprovable opinion.
But to suggest that Clinton is as remotely as dishonest, you might as well proclaim the world is flat, WWE is real, or Dane Cook is funny. These aren't mathematically verifiable facts (well not all of them), but they're about as close as you can get.
My personal experience is, activities in the morning are more effective for weight loss. I used to walk ~4km in the evening for more than a year, but did not result in weight loss. But when switched to morning walk, I could see results in couple of months.
Did you walk before or after supper? If it was after supper perhaps you just convinced yourself that you worked up an appetite and ate enough calories to compensate for the walk.
With the morning walk if you walked before breakfast you probably didn't increase consumption to compensate, and if it was after you were probably satisfied enough to wait for lunch.
In either case the determining factor was more likely a mental one then a biological one.
Probably it has something to do with glucose/sugar levels
Probably not
She has a plan. It's the same plan that she always uses. As Peggy Noonan recently wrote, the Clinton Scandal Ritual is to:
Lie, deny, revise, claim not to remember specifics, stall for time. When it passes, call the story “old news” full of questions that have already been answered. “As I’ve repeatedly said . . .”
That's every politician's plan, Obama dealing with Reverent Wright is one of the only examples of a politician dealing with a scandal head on, everyone else just stays low key and waits until something else catches the media's attention.
Clinton's problem is that there's an election campaign so there's nothing else interesting going on besides Clinton v. Trump. As long as no other Clinton news comes up the media is going to talk about emails.
She just needs to start flooding the airwaves with press conferences until everyone finds something else to talk about and moves on.
Maybe Mi's just partisan, ever think of that?
It's quite possible, and it's possible that he's picked up some of the racially charged beliefs of his "team".
Being on the left I know I have to fight the urge to negatively stereotype blue collar workers and poor rural folk who could be categorized as "rednecks".
Holy Shit. Talking point central there. Do you get your "ammunition" from Daily Kos or straight from Soros?
I got it from watching the news. But even if I did get it from talking points so what? Just because an argument has been repeated doesn't make it wrong, talking points are only an issue when they're misleading or when the speaker is just repeating them and doesn't really understand.
The problem in US politics isn't the reliance on talking points, it's too many people saying too many different dumb things. If they actually stuck to the same talking points debunking them would be a lot easier.
How is that racism?
It's an example extra layer of scrutiny applied only when the candidate is black. One only needs see the relative disinterest with which the birthers treated the fact that the exact scenario they were speculating about applied directly to Cruz.
Nothing, I just don't want to waste time.
What Trump actually said, was that the judge — a Mexican racist himself ("La Raza" member) — may have a conflict of interest.
Which was dumb, despite the fact they kept confusing different "La Raza"s. But more to the point lots of white judges are members of ethnic professional groups, no one accuses them of being racist, so only making it an issue when it's a Mexican judge in a group for Mexican judges is racist.
If it is Ok to suspect, that an All-white jury may be unfair to a Black defendant, why is it "racist" to suspect, a Mexican may be unfair to a White one?
Judges, unlike juries, have specific training on how to deal with biases. And there's no reason to think that a Mexican would have a negative stereotype about a German.
Muslim and Arab are highly correlated, particularly in the minds of Islamaphobes.
Regularly stereotypes blacks "you've got nothing to lose", suggesting that they're one monolithic underclass.
Never heard of it. Actual quotes, please.
Meh, why not.
Notice the stream of negative stereotypes and a false claim of 58% black youth unemployment.
He's not even talking to a black crowd, he's making his "outreach" to a white crowd.
If you're explicitly asked about it? Yes.
If David Duke and other white supremacists have repeatedly and enthusiastically endorsed you unlike anyone else in decades? Definitely yes.
There's a reason Duke and the other white supremacists continue to support Trump so much, he refuses to convincingly say they're wrong.
Would Bernie Sanders disavow Lenin?
Not sure, there's a reason I didn't support Sanders.
Has Hillary Clinton disavowed Al Sharpton, who, unlike Duke, actually encouraged racial violence
It was a lot more BLM than anti-Semitism, the anger was the perception that the life of a black child was treated as secondary to the life of the white (and Jewish) driver who had killed him.
Yeah I did. And I unlike you realize the following -
1. stripping the email address was almost certainly at a minimum an attempt to hide the fact that she was using a private server for government emails. (Something which would have gotten a "normal" person fired if not charged with multiple felonies)
Except they already would have known she was using a private email address. That was the reason for the document request in the first place.
More likely it would be the case that they didn't want her email address on the thousands of pages of printouts they sent, maybe Clinton was hoping that the address wouldn't be published and she could keep using it.
It would be like a phone number, the moment it's published it's pretty much useless and you need to update everyone with your new contact info.
2. stripping/altering the email address would have allowed them to cherry pick items - e.g. "well this email is potentially a problem, good thing it doesn't have clinton's email address on it!"
3. Later actions by the IT consultant (destroying evidence which was under subpoena) indicate the above was not simply "oooh we want to protect her private email address" rather it indicates they were looking at hiding or destroying the information.....
Possibly, though this guy talking about his "VERY VIP" client doesn't seem particularly suited to the uber-competent cloak and dagger world.
And the nuking actually makes a lot of sense if you think you've gotten everything you're legally supposed to.
At that point she's under no legal obligation to keep her remaining non-work emails, but the moment someone thinks to subpoena them she has to keep them around and they become at risk of public disclosure.
If I was faced with the possibility of my enemies getting a copy of my personal inbox I'd launch my hard drive into the sun.
Donald Trump does not hide it, that's true. That's because he, by all appearances, is not racist.
But, if you accuse him of racism, you have ample evidence, don't you? Let's see it, shall we? Be sure, though, to include only the things Trump actually said or did — not somebody else paraphrasing and otherwise engaging in hearsay...
Spent years suggesting that a black president wasn't born in the US, despite a ton of excellent evidence to the contrary.
Said a judge of Mexican heritage wasn't fit to judge him due to his heritage.
While speaking about illegal immigrants has focused pretty exclusively on those of Mexican ethnicity, has also engaged in broad (and inaccurate) generalizations about that group.
Has proposed banning members of a religion from the US (very similar to racism).
Regularly stereotypes blacks "you've got nothing to lose", suggesting that they're one monolithic underclass.
Extreme reluctance to reject or disavow David Duke or other white supremacists, same with racist memes he happens to retweet (accidental or not).
Now I don't know if he's personally racist or now, but many of the things he says and does are quite racist.
This is finished. There's no way she wins the election, and I say that as one of her supporters.
Somehow I doubt this.
Here is clear evidence of trying to hide something. This leaves no room for doubt.
And that evidence is... that her IT guy used Reddit?
That he was looking into ways to sanitize sensitive information before sending it out?
That they changed the email retention policy on a private server a couple years after Clinton left the State Department?
Just because a story has the words "Clinton" and "email" doesn't mean it contains incriminating evidence.
Why are they "accused" of jacking the price? "Described as" jacking the price would be a statement made in a moral society. In case any one forgot, Communism is the immoral social order.
Capitalism is based on the buyer and seller both being able to make free and informed decisions and creating a fair market.
In an emergency the sellers who happened to hold scarce critical resources have a temporary monopoly, ie selling a bottle of water to a man dying of thirst.
In the long term you'll get a functional market again, but in the immediate term many of the assumptions that make free markets moral and fair are missing and you have a massive imbalance in power which is managed by social mores, not market forces.
In Capitalism, a surge in demand creates a bubble of supply by willing contributors and the price quickly collapses when the demand is met. And the reason this happens is because prices increase. If there were more people in need of rides than willing drivers, a price could be increased until everyone able to give a ride would be willing to give rides (even those who would never consider doing so otherwise).
Is there really a significant upsurge in the supply of Uber drivers during an emergency? My guess is no, that the major function of the surge is prioritizing, not increasing demand.
Supply and demand. Market is efficiently allocating scarce resources. Price increase will increase supply providing consumers with more of the scarce resource. It's a thing of beauty really.
I think this kind of thinking makes the same fundamental mistake as communism.
Your theory works great, it makes for a very efficient, productive, and fair system. The only problem is that people don't work the way you need them to work for your theory to succeed.
Price increases in an emergency will typically be perceived as companies taking advantage of a desperate customer, and customers will react with outrage.
There are really only two ways to deal with this.
First, try to convince the users that the price increase is fair and just. This is what they're doing now and they're apparently failing, maybe they'll succeed in the future but it's a tough job and they're currently failing.
Second, accept that they can't change human nature. Surge due to regular high demand (ie Saturday night) is probably something they can sell to customers and keep doing. But during an emergency? People aren't going to like that.
What they should do is still pay drivers the surge rate in an emergency, but only charge passengers the regular rate (or even free).
Sure it costs money but it's great PR, and big emergencies like that are rare enough that it won't be a serious monetary hit.
Keeping in touch and up to date with old friends? Social networks solved a lot of that.
Having visual conversations with distant relatives? Video chat solved that.
Getting lost? GPS navigation solved that.
Finding answers to factual questions? Search engines (kinda) solved that.
Giving public platforms to ordinary people? Blogs solved that.
Just try going back and living in the early 90's and see how you like it. Techies have addressed tons of real world problems, and come up with at least partial solutions to a lot of them. Naturally many remain and some new ones have arisen, we don't live in a utopia, but it's not like they've been doing nothing.
Is that really how Elon Musk writes emails?
Either that guy is copying actual internal emails sent by Musk or he's the most incompetent spear phisher ever.
Without offering any opinion on whether what Snowden did was good, bad, or potato, my first though here is:
The odds that Snowden was given refuge in Russia without turning over 100% of what he took are about the same as the odds of him getting his pardon: zero.
Which is better than him putting it all up on the internet, I suppose. While I'm sure there's national security intelligence in that data dump of great interest to Russia, they will do their best (which is very good) to coerce him into not revealing any of that to anyone else.
Not necessarily. The point of intelligence is to gain international influence and leverage, but by harbouring Snowden and staying on good terms with him Russia is getting tons of both.
He's a very high profile and effective critic of the US's intelligence gathering activities, he gives Russia cover for their own massive human rights abuses, he makes Russia the good guy among a crowd that should be stringently opposed to them. I wouldn't be surprised if Wikileaks' good relationship with Russia was related to their treatment of Snowden. And the intel might not be that valuable anymore anyways. Since the day Snowden showed up in China I suspect the NSA has been trying to obsolete everything he took.
I mean I'm sure they'd still love the full dump, and maybe they got it, but I don't think one can overlook how valuable he is sitting unmolested in Moscow.
No one in Germany thought so, and they actually HAD curveball and said he was both unreliable and most likely a fraud
Meanwhile, Blix and Ritter BOTH told us the stories were a lie.
Powell, like any apparatchnik, protected the boss and lied.
They knew individual parts of the puzzle were a lie, they may not have realized the conclusion was also wrong.
Saddam having an active WMD program (at least wrt chemical weapons) made a lot of sense. He'd used them before to protect himself from Iran and suppress internal dissident. He even hinted that he did have WMDs since he wanted to scare away the Iranians.
My opinion at the time was three things.
1) Saddam probably had a WMD program.
2) Saddam was content to stay in Iraq and was not an imminent threat.
3) The desire to invade Iraq had very little to do WMDs or an immediate terrorism threat and was more a desire to remake the middle east.
The summary totally ignores Powell's extremely critical remarks about Hillary, her lies, manipulation, and the public exploitation of his name against his wishes.
A lie of omission is still a lie, and that you choose to ignore these facts makes them all the more critical to examine.
Funny, I didn't see him call her a liar. Here's the most critical remarks I found about her from the article:
Mr. Powell lamented that while he respected Mrs. Clinton, he would “rather not have to vote for her,” describing the Democratic presidential nominee as having “a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational.”
“H.R.C. could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it,” Mr. Powell wrote late last month, referring to Mrs. Clinton by her initials. “I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini-tantrum at a Hamptons party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these ‘character’ minefields.”
In December 2015, he told Condoleezza Rice, his successor at the State Department, that the Republican political attacks on Benghazi were “a stupid witch hunt” and wrote that “basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thought Libyans now love me and I am O.K. in this very vulnerable place.” He added that “blame also rests on his leaders and supporters back here,” including Mrs. Clinton.
A few months later, in a discussion about Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal, Mr. Powell lamented that “everything H.R.C. touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”
Oh, and of course his most critical remarks about Trump:
Mr. Powell wrote last month that Mr. Trump is “his own best enemy” and added: “I will speak out when I feel it appropriate and not after every idiot thing he says.”
“No need to debate it with you now, but Trump is a national disgrace and an international pariah,” Mr. Powell wrote in June, noting the criticism of Mr. Trump by several prominent conservatives. “He is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him.”
“Yup, the whole birther movement was racist,” Mr. Powell wrote. “That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim. As I have said before, ‘What if he was?’ Muslims are born as Americans everyday.”
Mr. Powell dismissed as completely ineffective Mr. Trump’s recent attempts to reach out to black voters, saying that the Republican nominee “takes us for idiots.”
“He can never overcome what he tried to do to Obama with his search for the birth certificate hoping to force Obama out of the presidency,” Mr. Powell wrote, saying to his aide, “You don’t fall for his false sincerity, I hope.”
“He appeals to the worst angels of the G.O.P. nature and poor white folks,”
So... are you sure you want the summary to go into his opinions on the candidates?
Even though he was an enthusiastic supporter of Obama.
This does not bode well.
One thing that's never made sense to me was his claim of being a Republican. He had very few Republican positions, and as Secretary of State, he was one of the most Left Wing members of the administration. The reason Iraq (and Afghanistan) went to hell in a handbasket was his influence - the idea of making nation-building a part of the mission was his idea, not just W's.
This is a novel strategy. How do you deal with the biggest US military disaster since Vietnam? Blame it on the people who opposed it!
If I recall that's the same strategy that was used for Vietnam as well.
No, it was wrong intelligence. Or else, why did UK, run by a Left wing government run by Tony Blair, back that? They could easily have told the US that Iraq had nothing, and that would have worked, but everybody's intelligence agencies seemed to suggest that Saddam had chemical and/or biological weapons
Because Blair had already agreed to go along with whatever Bush did.
Sure, everybody thought Saddam had WMDs, but none of the intelligence agencies were certain and they didn't believe he was a threat.
I don't know how dubious Powell was of the evidence at the time, but the intelligence agents who produced it were very dubious. Powell gave the presentation he did because it was his job to push the administrations agenda and the administration really wanted war.