If the left were neopuritans, I'd expect to see a lot more about Melania's past, including the nude pictures and allegations of porn. (If it's legit for Trump to attack Bill Clinton, it's legit for Clinton to attack Melaniia Trump, after all.) What the left is objecting to is sexual assault, not any form of consensual sexual behavior. There was also a certain amount of leftist outrage comparing Republican attacks on Michelle Obama's clothes and their tolerance of what Melania was photographed wearing, but that seems to be mostly over.
People have been predicting the end of the US for a long time now, and our enemies have tended to underestimate us greatly (which is why they wound up waging war against us). Sometime someone's going to say the US is at its end and be right, but it doesn't look to me like the US is in the worst shape of its existence.
but attacking the character of a 12 year old girl and accusing her of "wanting" an older man to rape her into a coma seems sketchy to me.
It's horrible. And, at that time, it was a standard part of a rape defense. A defense attorney who failed to slut-shame the victim was not doing his or her duty to the defendant, and would be acting unethically. Our treatment of rape victims is still often callous and degrading, but it's improved a lot since then.
Also, we know that Clinton laughed about some parts of the case quite a few years later. We don't know her emotional reactions at the time.
You may not realize this, but gold-digging whores and frigid dykes make up a relatively small amount of the female population. I have no real interest in what happens between the rich men and the whores, as long as I don't have to pay attention. Most women do not enjoy that treatment. Heck, most men I know don't sexually assault women.
All we have to do is teach most people not to commit crimes. Grabbing a woman's pussy without consent is a crime in my state, and I'd hope all other states as well. We need to get rich and powerful people more accountable for criminal activity.
What I simply can't understand is how people get the consent thing so wrong. If she wants you to grab her pussy, have fun. If she doesn't, don't touch it. Touching someone sexually when he or she doesn't want it is sexual assault. Reading books about weird consensual sex isn't assault in any form. Reading books about nonconsensual sex isn't assault in any form. Grabbing your own pussy (if you have one) isn't assault in any form. How do people get into a state where something a person does themselves that doesn't involve anyone else is seen as equivalent in any way to assault?
If you'd like to provide examples of Politifact "pants on fire" claims that are bogus, please do. The few I've glanced at have mostly been legit.
If you take a look at Snopes, there's a lot of stuff debunking lies about Clinton, and a lot debunking lies about Trump. They do provide explanations and sources, which you should look at rather than blindly trusting them.
Your first source says that Google has been accused of rigging autocomplete results, which they deny. Since it's algorithms, it's easy to find bias and hard to verify it. The source does point out the dangers inherent in Google being so pervasive, and suggests that anyone complacent should just imagine the Koch brothers buying it, so I'm impressed by that. Your second source says that a CEO is working to favor one candidate, and I must say that I'm shocked by the idea that any CEO would have a political preference. It's unusual only in that CEOs tend to be Republicans. As far as meeting with the Obama administration goes, wouldn't any news organization want to do that? Unfortunately, I can't see more than the first couple of sentences without registering. I have noticed that the WSJ can go seriously off the rails when it talks about political matters.
Trump also appeals to a certain nihilistic group that sees the system as thoroughly broken and wants to destroy much of it and start over. Trump's also easy to believe in for the desperate, since he says so many different things that it's easy to pay attention to what you want to hear and ignore the rest.
The size of that nihilistic group is a real problem that needs to be addressed. When that many people think the system is broken, it is broken (it only works if most people generally accept it), and we need to fix it.
media is now at it lowest integrity in their history
Nah. It's been worse, and it's never been as good as people think. There was a time when the media generally agreed on some things, but that didn't mean they were true. Today, we have some news sources trying to be reasonable and investigative, and the rest are acting like it was the 1700s.
In most Presidential elections, I've voted against a candidate by voting for their major party opponent. There have been some candidates I've voted for, and to be honest I've sometimes been disappointed (Carter is a great human being, but was a lousy President). This year, I'm for Clinton. We'll see if I get disappointed or not.
Your perceptions of Trump and Clinton are not clearly or obviously true. It's looked to me for decades that the anti-Clinton attacks were trumped up (pun not intended, honest), whereas Trump is getting better treatment than he deserves. I'm willing to discuss this and look at the facts, but the accusations against her tend to be light on facts and heavy on bias and misinformation. I've been digging up facts on Corney's statement that Clinton's handling of classified information doesn't historically warrant prosecution, and he's right. Anybody telling you that you'd be in prison if you had done what Clinton had done is not telling the truth.
When I've looked at Politifact, they tend to provide reasonable explanations for their conclusions, and they aren't shy about skewering Clinton when they think it warranted. They're probably biased somehow, but I don't think the bias is anywhere near strong enough to explain the vast differences they record between Clinton and Trump.
The problem with gender and racial differences is not that they exist, but that most people seem to assume that how they're expressed in our culture is their natural form. There's a lot more men and women in STEM. Part of this is likely to be inherent differences between men and women, but part of it is undoubtedly culture. We don't have a good way of telling how much. Are there so few women in STEM fields because males and females have different brain structure, or because girls are discouraged in ways boys are not, or both, or something else in addition? There used to be more women studying computer science. Does that mean that the field has changed, making it less attractive to women, or that women were unduly pushed into the field earlier, or that they're discouraged more now?
We don't know these things. What we do know is that, in the past, we were frequently wrong about them, and that where we found racial and sexual disparities we tended to find groups that were not given a fair shake, and, in the cases where we could remedy that, the disparities shrunk a lot or went away.
Another thing we do know is that there is discrimination against certain gender and racial groups and unwarrantedly different treatment, and it's a reasonable guess that if these problems went away we'd have more women and blacks and such in certain fields. It's reasonable to act as if there are no particular differences among races and genders in most ways, until we know better.
Liberals do have characteristic blind spots, such as distrust of nuclear power and GMOs, but discrimination isn't one of them.
You can learn to understand Special Relativity, which apparently you haven't yet. General Relativity is far more difficult. The foundation of SR is that physical laws are the same in all inertial reference frames, which means that everything is stationary relative to itself.
To give you a start, an inertial reference frame is one that doesn't have a perceptible force acting on it. All laws of physics are the same in every such frame, no matter how it's moving relative to you, according to SR. To derive a lot of useful things, the only physical law you need is that the speed of light in a vacuum is always the same. You will find that you need to drop any ideas of absolute space and absolute time, and realize that "at the same time" doesn't have a real definition for two events that are in different places.
The Alcubierre drive requires something of negative mass, which may well be impossible, or there may be other impossibilities involved. If it works as an FTL drive, it's also a time machine according to Special Relativity, and we get even more weird things to think about.
It worked on Babylon 5, last episode of season 4, "Deconstruction of Fall[ing|en] Stars" (can't remember the exact title). The simulated Garibaldi, aware that he was a simulation, hacked into the computer he was running on and controlled a thing or two.
Instead of saying "impossible according to the laws of physics as we understand them", isn't it reasonable just to say "impossible"? There's a big difference between saying that large colonies in the Asteroid belt are impossible and saying that time travel is impossible.
Thing is, Lord Kelvin was one man, and he said heavier-than-air flight was impractical, not impossible. What we've got is pretty much the entire field of physics saying that warp drives are impossible without something with negative mass.
There are other problems. The more costs a company can pass on to someone else, the more profitable it will be, which is the problem of externalities. There's asymmetry of information, or lack of information. If it's hard to tell if a widget is good or not, it will be hard for anyone to sell a good widget for a higher cost than a mediocre one, and good widgets will be driven out of the marketplace. There's natural monopolies, in which the cost of entry into a market is very high, so a company can practice monopolistic pricing and threaten to bankrupt incipient competitors by dropping its prices to something more competitive until they're out of business, then raising prices again. Ideally, in the market, people pay money for what gives them the most value, but it may be cheaper to actively delude the public than to provide more value, or to spend money to make it more difficult to buy the competitor's product..
In fields where people can see what they're getting, with reasonable barriers to entry, general access to the market, and which doesn't produce costs to society as a whole, privatization and the market are wonderful.
I'm talking cherrypicking in terms of picking out quotes with significant meaning, which everybody does, and not cherrypicking to distort the meaning. As I said before, if Trump has problems saying what he means, and needs people to examine context and say what he really means, he's got a major problem that needs to be considered.
I'm reluctant to say Trump is guilty by verifiable facts until he's convicted, myself, although Trump University looks pretty bad. On the other side, Trump fans seem to overlook the verifiable fact that anyone who did what Clinton did with classified materials has not faced prosecution.
Slashdot Mirror
There's lots of large wealthy democracies whee Sanders would be a centrist.
If the left were neopuritans, I'd expect to see a lot more about Melania's past, including the nude pictures and allegations of porn. (If it's legit for Trump to attack Bill Clinton, it's legit for Clinton to attack Melaniia Trump, after all.) What the left is objecting to is sexual assault, not any form of consensual sexual behavior. There was also a certain amount of leftist outrage comparing Republican attacks on Michelle Obama's clothes and their tolerance of what Melania was photographed wearing, but that seems to be mostly over.
People have been predicting the end of the US for a long time now, and our enemies have tended to underestimate us greatly (which is why they wound up waging war against us). Sometime someone's going to say the US is at its end and be right, but it doesn't look to me like the US is in the worst shape of its existence.
It's horrible. And, at that time, it was a standard part of a rape defense. A defense attorney who failed to slut-shame the victim was not doing his or her duty to the defendant, and would be acting unethically. Our treatment of rape victims is still often callous and degrading, but it's improved a lot since then.
Also, we know that Clinton laughed about some parts of the case quite a few years later. We don't know her emotional reactions at the time.
If you want the truth, treat snopes.com like you would wikipedia, as a summary and a list of sources to check up on.
You may not realize this, but gold-digging whores and frigid dykes make up a relatively small amount of the female population. I have no real interest in what happens between the rich men and the whores, as long as I don't have to pay attention. Most women do not enjoy that treatment. Heck, most men I know don't sexually assault women.
All we have to do is teach most people not to commit crimes. Grabbing a woman's pussy without consent is a crime in my state, and I'd hope all other states as well. We need to get rich and powerful people more accountable for criminal activity.
What I simply can't understand is how people get the consent thing so wrong. If she wants you to grab her pussy, have fun. If she doesn't, don't touch it. Touching someone sexually when he or she doesn't want it is sexual assault. Reading books about weird consensual sex isn't assault in any form. Reading books about nonconsensual sex isn't assault in any form. Grabbing your own pussy (if you have one) isn't assault in any form. How do people get into a state where something a person does themselves that doesn't involve anyone else is seen as equivalent in any way to assault?
If you'd like to provide examples of Politifact "pants on fire" claims that are bogus, please do. The few I've glanced at have mostly been legit.
If you take a look at Snopes, there's a lot of stuff debunking lies about Clinton, and a lot debunking lies about Trump. They do provide explanations and sources, which you should look at rather than blindly trusting them.
Your first source says that Google has been accused of rigging autocomplete results, which they deny. Since it's algorithms, it's easy to find bias and hard to verify it. The source does point out the dangers inherent in Google being so pervasive, and suggests that anyone complacent should just imagine the Koch brothers buying it, so I'm impressed by that. Your second source says that a CEO is working to favor one candidate, and I must say that I'm shocked by the idea that any CEO would have a political preference. It's unusual only in that CEOs tend to be Republicans. As far as meeting with the Obama administration goes, wouldn't any news organization want to do that? Unfortunately, I can't see more than the first couple of sentences without registering. I have noticed that the WSJ can go seriously off the rails when it talks about political matters.
Trump also appeals to a certain nihilistic group that sees the system as thoroughly broken and wants to destroy much of it and start over. Trump's also easy to believe in for the desperate, since he says so many different things that it's easy to pay attention to what you want to hear and ignore the rest.
The size of that nihilistic group is a real problem that needs to be addressed. When that many people think the system is broken, it is broken (it only works if most people generally accept it), and we need to fix it.
Nah. It's been worse, and it's never been as good as people think. There was a time when the media generally agreed on some things, but that didn't mean they were true. Today, we have some news sources trying to be reasonable and investigative, and the rest are acting like it was the 1700s.
In most Presidential elections, I've voted against a candidate by voting for their major party opponent. There have been some candidates I've voted for, and to be honest I've sometimes been disappointed (Carter is a great human being, but was a lousy President). This year, I'm for Clinton. We'll see if I get disappointed or not.
Your perceptions of Trump and Clinton are not clearly or obviously true. It's looked to me for decades that the anti-Clinton attacks were trumped up (pun not intended, honest), whereas Trump is getting better treatment than he deserves. I'm willing to discuss this and look at the facts, but the accusations against her tend to be light on facts and heavy on bias and misinformation. I've been digging up facts on Corney's statement that Clinton's handling of classified information doesn't historically warrant prosecution, and he's right. Anybody telling you that you'd be in prison if you had done what Clinton had done is not telling the truth.
When I've looked at Politifact, they tend to provide reasonable explanations for their conclusions, and they aren't shy about skewering Clinton when they think it warranted. They're probably biased somehow, but I don't think the bias is anywhere near strong enough to explain the vast differences they record between Clinton and Trump.
The problem with gender and racial differences is not that they exist, but that most people seem to assume that how they're expressed in our culture is their natural form. There's a lot more men and women in STEM. Part of this is likely to be inherent differences between men and women, but part of it is undoubtedly culture. We don't have a good way of telling how much. Are there so few women in STEM fields because males and females have different brain structure, or because girls are discouraged in ways boys are not, or both, or something else in addition? There used to be more women studying computer science. Does that mean that the field has changed, making it less attractive to women, or that women were unduly pushed into the field earlier, or that they're discouraged more now?
We don't know these things. What we do know is that, in the past, we were frequently wrong about them, and that where we found racial and sexual disparities we tended to find groups that were not given a fair shake, and, in the cases where we could remedy that, the disparities shrunk a lot or went away.
Another thing we do know is that there is discrimination against certain gender and racial groups and unwarrantedly different treatment, and it's a reasonable guess that if these problems went away we'd have more women and blacks and such in certain fields. It's reasonable to act as if there are no particular differences among races and genders in most ways, until we know better.
Liberals do have characteristic blind spots, such as distrust of nuclear power and GMOs, but discrimination isn't one of them.
Dark matter has been observed through gravitational lensing, and it's pretty definite it's there.
If you could travel at the speed of light, you would not experience time. Not that you'd notice.
You can learn to understand Special Relativity, which apparently you haven't yet. General Relativity is far more difficult. The foundation of SR is that physical laws are the same in all inertial reference frames, which means that everything is stationary relative to itself.
To give you a start, an inertial reference frame is one that doesn't have a perceptible force acting on it. All laws of physics are the same in every such frame, no matter how it's moving relative to you, according to SR. To derive a lot of useful things, the only physical law you need is that the speed of light in a vacuum is always the same. You will find that you need to drop any ideas of absolute space and absolute time, and realize that "at the same time" doesn't have a real definition for two events that are in different places.
Wormholes are shortcuts, not FTL travel, if they exist and we can safely transit them.
The Alcubierre drive requires something of negative mass, which may well be impossible, or there may be other impossibilities involved. If it works as an FTL drive, it's also a time machine according to Special Relativity, and we get even more weird things to think about.
It worked on Babylon 5, last episode of season 4, "Deconstruction of Fall[ing|en] Stars" (can't remember the exact title). The simulated Garibaldi, aware that he was a simulation, hacked into the computer he was running on and controlled a thing or two.
Instead of saying "impossible according to the laws of physics as we understand them", isn't it reasonable just to say "impossible"? There's a big difference between saying that large colonies in the Asteroid belt are impossible and saying that time travel is impossible.
Thing is, Lord Kelvin was one man, and he said heavier-than-air flight was impractical, not impossible. What we've got is pretty much the entire field of physics saying that warp drives are impossible without something with negative mass.
There are other problems. The more costs a company can pass on to someone else, the more profitable it will be, which is the problem of externalities. There's asymmetry of information, or lack of information. If it's hard to tell if a widget is good or not, it will be hard for anyone to sell a good widget for a higher cost than a mediocre one, and good widgets will be driven out of the marketplace. There's natural monopolies, in which the cost of entry into a market is very high, so a company can practice monopolistic pricing and threaten to bankrupt incipient competitors by dropping its prices to something more competitive until they're out of business, then raising prices again. Ideally, in the market, people pay money for what gives them the most value, but it may be cheaper to actively delude the public than to provide more value, or to spend money to make it more difficult to buy the competitor's product..
In fields where people can see what they're getting, with reasonable barriers to entry, general access to the market, and which doesn't produce costs to society as a whole, privatization and the market are wonderful.
I'm talking cherrypicking in terms of picking out quotes with significant meaning, which everybody does, and not cherrypicking to distort the meaning. As I said before, if Trump has problems saying what he means, and needs people to examine context and say what he really means, he's got a major problem that needs to be considered.
I'm reluctant to say Trump is guilty by verifiable facts until he's convicted, myself, although Trump University looks pretty bad. On the other side, Trump fans seem to overlook the verifiable fact that anyone who did what Clinton did with classified materials has not faced prosecution.