The closest I got was when I had partly gotten over depression, and felt it start to worsen again, towards my earlier state. It was really tempting to make absolutely sure I wouldn't be that depressed again.
When I got my new laptop with Windows 10, I just followed the path of least resistance and set up the account the way the OS recommended. Then, a bit later, I couldn't log into the thing because it couldn't get online. There was wifi where I was, but it had a signon page. I wound up using my phone as a hotspot and immediately looked up how to change to a local account.
Anyone opposing marijuana legalization also might get contribution checks from illegal drug dealers. Legalizing the stuff would cut down on their business hard.
"Promote general welfare" doesn't mean "provide health insurance/healthcare "
No, "Promote general welfare" is far more general. However, it's basically Congress's decision as to what constitutes General Welfare, in the absence of a more specific definition in the Constitution.
The Constitution also outlaws slavery and indentured servitude. Which happens to be my view of taking of money from someone and giving it to another, under threat of force. If you think that is Liberty, then you're a great socialist. I happen to think it is evil.
That definition applies to all taxes, since their use is to give money to people under some circumstance or another. Most people of all sorts of political and economic viewpoints believe that taxes are necessary to run a country. (There's a tremendous amount of debate on the details.) You don't have to be a socialist to believe in taxation and giving money to people. (Otto von Bismarck was not a socialist, for example.)
Slavery and indentured servitude are cases where a master tells a slave or indentured servant what to do, and legally has to be obeyed. My boss can tell me what to do, and I can either do that or quit. Therefore, I'm neither a slave nor an indentured servant. Taking some of your money isn't slavery, since there's no actual legal requirement for you to make money. You want to earn money, you're participating in the system, and the system has to be financially supported.
"Universal health care", "social security" - Congress has explicit authority to tax and spend for the common defense and general welfare. Congressional laws on spending money are almost always constitutional. Some people like to pretend that the General Welfare is restricted in some way, but that's not what the Constitution said.
"restrictions on private ownership of armaments" - Whether the Second covers all armaments is debatable, but as I read it the ban on buying new automatic weapons is unconstitutional.
"standing military" - Where does it say that? Congress has explicit authority to maintain an army and a navy, with the restriction that no appropriations bill for the Army can be for more than two years. Congress also has authority to tax and spend for the Common Defense.
"war on drugs" - I find this to be really dubious, Constitutionally. We had a frippin' amendment to ban alcohol. The Feds can certainly finance anti-drug actions, including those of the states, and can regulate interstate commerce of drugs, but I don't see that the Federal Government has any authority to make drugs grown in one state and consumed there which are legal by state law illegal.
I'm required to do basic accounting on my income in dollars. I can use whatever sort of trades or currency or whatever, but the IRS will require an accounting in dollars.
I'm required to pay taxes and government fees in dollars. Therefore, I need some.
If I win a civil court case, by far the most likely result is that I get a certain number of dollars.
On a larger scale, the US government is going to do its best to keep dollars as a useful currency.
Therefore, as a US citizen living and working in the US, dollars work a lot better than any other currency.
There are inherent disadvantages to Bitcoin, such as high transaction costs and long waiting times. While there can be high transaction costs and long waiting times when dealing with dollars, those are because the people doing the transaction can charge the fees and don't need to be efficient. Banks can set their transaction costs and inconvenience to be less than Bitcoin's if they see it as competition.
Blue-collar workers are very familiar with the reality that they typically live in. There is no a priori reason to think them more aware of reality where they don't typically go.
Blue-collar workers are, by definition, at the lowest levels of larger companies (since management is white-collar). If anything, they have less ability to see the bigger realities than white-collar workers.
That higher education makes people more critical is at least plausible. That it makes them more manipulative, more exploitative, and less honest is less plausible. I'm finding this a lot less plausible, and would like some sort of cite to confirm this.
They examined a large collection of tweets (about 22 million) to make up the list. There's no evidence that the tweets were selected by a biased process. The wording is a trifle unclear, but it looks like they got the sites from the tweets. If they got the list of known propaganda sites by an unbiased process, it's valid.
If fake news is overwhelmingly right-wing, then one would expect that a selection of propaganda websites would be overwhelmingly right-wing. If the propaganda websites are overwhelmingly right-wing, and the sites were selected by an apolitical process, that's an interesting result in itself. It doesn't invalidate the study. Read the abstract: it says that the identified propaganda sites were primarily Trump supporters and extreme right-wing people.
Sure. Most transgender people I'm aware of just get what they need and go on with life. However, there are people who don't like transsexuals for some reason, and deny their existence, accuse them of being mentally ill, and keep referring to them by inappropriate pronouns and names.
Someone probably already has made a suggestion like growth hormone for girls and malnutrition for boys. It's amazing the range of crackpot opinions you can get. No group with any actual power is going to push them.
I like the metric "Does shit get done? Is it good shit?", and wish it were used more. There are some jobs where it's easily measurable. A factory worker might make sixty widgets in a day, and a random five may pass quality control. There are other jobs which require cooperation and teamwork, and it's difficult to attribute that to individuals. In the case of software development, it's hard to know if it is good for some time. Something that works just fine might have security holes and completely unintelligible code.
Therefore, employers employ proxy measurements instead of actual productivity, and those are a lot more subjective. Working extra hours is seen as dedication rather than semi-incompetence or being bad at time management. (On-call is relevant to the business.) Soft skills, which can be very important in keeping teams running smoothly, can be undervalued (and probably are frequently). On the opposite side, it seems to be easier to get rid of someone for lack of technical skills than in bad social skills that undermine other people's performance.
Heck, if employers were interested in getting good stuff done, they would work at getting employees to do that, rather than going with the business fad of the year. Open-plan offices for software developers is not generally a good idea, but it's trendy, or at least used to be. One of the things I like about my current job is the relative lack of crap involved in doing good stuff.
Communist regimes have always placed a lot of emphasis on the state in practice, but not just the state. Stalin, for example, appealed to patriotism.
If you would like to provide some evidence that white males staying dominant and favoring policies that support them is any less identity politics as another racial group trying to achieve equality, please do. Until then, it would appear that "identity politics" is politics based on racial or ethnic or religious groups that you don't approve of.
I mean the people who get their information from Party-approved lies, and who are willing to believe the wildest things about their Party's opponents. It was obvious to all that Trump was the biggest liar in the race. His supporters disregarded that. Trump appealed to his supporters by emotion and lying, promising people what they wanted far more flagrantly than other candidates. He didn't campaign on universal health care or social security (introduced by Otto von Bismarck, neither a Nazi nor any sort of socialist). His message was xenophobia and jobs, and that's quite reminiscent of Nazi propaganda.
I'll just go with your cite, which lists as its first definition "exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of price". Note the "or" there. Only one of the conditions need be true for something to be a monopoly as defined in the dictionary site you provided. That means that Microsoft is a monopoly if it has sufficient control to manipulate prices.
If someone was discriminated against they can prove it in court
Ever been involved in a case where you were illegally discriminated against? I have. It's not nearly that simple. The recruiter told me they were going to extend a job offer, I was asked for my birth date for a background investigation, and then nobody had ever said anything about a job offer, no sir, and nobody was interested in talking to me. I was then, as I am now, in the 40-65 age band, where discrimination is illegal.
I filed a complaint with the appropriate state agency, and then the company replied, saying pretty much what I'd claimed. I got a lawyer ($3K up front, and 1/3 of any winnings), who wrote a reply to that. The claim was denied based on their never having said anything about an offer (and the company had verified in its reply that they did mention it), and it wasn't worth going further.
Approximately no employer is going to fire you and cite grounds of race, sex, religion, or refusing sexual advances. They will come up with another reason. Fighting this will be at least moderately expensive, and it will be uncertain.
A statement that sexual harassment happens is a general statement, and easily substantiated with evidence. I can easily find a case of one woman who was sexually harassed. A statement that it's common does need evidence to support. Similarly, GP made a flat statement that it wasn't happening, and that is a definite claim that does ask for evidence - and the evidence says it's wrong.
I'm not going to have a discussion about harassement that is not occuring.
Now, can you prove that harassment is not occurring? Lack of evidence doesn't show anything one way or another. I've been in lots of discussions about things that might or might not be happening. The wording can get a little odd, of course.
We don't want to talk about things that simply do not happen, and thus require no tangible action or discussion.
And, again, you make a very large and sweeping assumption. Since we can definitely find women who have been sexually harassed, it's also a false one.
It's possible to make a claim sincerely when the evidence just isn't there, and it's possible to be right. If you don't have evidence, you don't know who's lying and/or misunderstanding.
Everyone and anyone can report harassement. If it's true, you'll have no issues producing evidence of it.
Actually, no. Some can be subtle. Getting slightly within her personal space or other dominance moves, spending a little extra time looking at her boobs and crotch, making what one person claims is a joke and the other person considers harassment, no individual action that's clearly out of line. It can add up.
Being treated equal by the law is not being treated equally by the justice system. There's all sorts of room for prejudice by police, prosecutors, and judges. The net result seems to be that men will be treated more harshly than women, despite the law being the same.
Murder is murder, but there's lesser crimes that appear to demonstrate sexual discrimination.
Men and women, to a large extent, have the same rights. That doesn't mean society isn't sexist, that they can do the same things.
Historical example: For a long time, women had the same right to vote and the same right to run for public office as men. Generally, they didn't run. Minnesota's first Congresswoman lost her seat over a "Come home, Coya!" campaign that was based on the idea that women belonged in the house, not the House. Obviously, things are much better now. Are female politicians still at a disadvantage because they're female? My guess would be "yes", but it's hard to find good evidence.
If feminism was about "equality of the sexes" then mission accomplished across the board.
The fact that you see the mission accomplished across the board, when there's still discrimination going on, suggests that it's still necessary. It's not necessary to get rid of sexist laws, by and large, but continuing work on attitudes is useful. Sexism was heavily ingrained into the culture not that long ago, and such things die hard.
despite reports stating that there was no discrimination [in pay]
Some people seized on the gender pay gap as evidence of sexism, not wanting to go deeper. Some people seize on the first reports that say the gender pay gap is due to certain reasons, not wanting to go deeper. For example, pay varies between jobs, and reports on the pay gap often say that men go into higher-paid occupations. Why are those occupations paid more? Historically, female-dominated professions tended to pay less than male-dominated professions, for no obvious reason. Are we truly beyond that? I'd say more research is needed.
There are definitions of monopoly that don't require 100% market share. They're in general more useful, because they define monopolies by their effects, rather than by specifying a criterion none of them meet. If you took micro-economics, you probably remember the difference between market prices and monopoly prices. Being a market leader is not the same thing, since if a market leader screws up people will go to the competition. When Microsoft screws up, people complain and still buy MS Windows and MS Office, for the most part.
Do you actually want electrical distribution competitions? Do you want two companies running wires everywhere? For above-ground distribution, it's necessary to space out wires. Power poles have crossbars, to keep physical distance between the neutral wire and the power wire(s) (it's normally distributed in three currents 120 degrees out of phase with each other, but individual phases can split off). Underground wire means more digging things up. It's going to be expensive.
Communism wasn't trying to tear down people's beliefs in things other than the state (it was generally anti-religion), and the idea was to get people in one class so everybody was part of the same group. Communism (and Socialism in general) tended to want to eliminate identity politics by having people share the same identity. I've seen very little in the way of post-modernism as you describe, and it's easy to ignore.
The rise of identity politics in America was on racial lines. White males were on top, white females should be subservient, blacks were inferior, and the natives were to be genocided. It's been around ever since. The only reason you don't perceive it is that the people you identify with were on top. Currently, there are various identities, and the old white male Christian supremacy is challenged, so some white male Christians have to attack the changing situation. Taking offense at little things is the reverse of carelessly insulting and disrespecting people. There are also too few post-modernists that fit your description to enforce any of that.
I have studied Hitler's rise to power, and I'm worried. Trump certainly isn't Hitler, but a lot of his supporters look a lot like Hitler supporters in their mindset. The neo-Nazis, as you say, don't have the numbers or appeal to be successful, but the right wing as a whole has numbers, and seems to want to follow a fickle authoritarian leader and believe or disbelieve as he says. If the hard-core Trump supporters were under 10%, I wouldn't be worried.
Slashdot Mirror
The closest I got was when I had partly gotten over depression, and felt it start to worsen again, towards my earlier state. It was really tempting to make absolutely sure I wouldn't be that depressed again.
When I got my new laptop with Windows 10, I just followed the path of least resistance and set up the account the way the OS recommended. Then, a bit later, I couldn't log into the thing because it couldn't get online. There was wifi where I was, but it had a signon page. I wound up using my phone as a hotspot and immediately looked up how to change to a local account.
Anyone opposing marijuana legalization also might get contribution checks from illegal drug dealers. Legalizing the stuff would cut down on their business hard.
No, "Promote general welfare" is far more general. However, it's basically Congress's decision as to what constitutes General Welfare, in the absence of a more specific definition in the Constitution.
That definition applies to all taxes, since their use is to give money to people under some circumstance or another. Most people of all sorts of political and economic viewpoints believe that taxes are necessary to run a country. (There's a tremendous amount of debate on the details.) You don't have to be a socialist to believe in taxation and giving money to people. (Otto von Bismarck was not a socialist, for example.)
Slavery and indentured servitude are cases where a master tells a slave or indentured servant what to do, and legally has to be obeyed. My boss can tell me what to do, and I can either do that or quit. Therefore, I'm neither a slave nor an indentured servant. Taking some of your money isn't slavery, since there's no actual legal requirement for you to make money. You want to earn money, you're participating in the system, and the system has to be financially supported.
"Universal health care", "social security" - Congress has explicit authority to tax and spend for the common defense and general welfare. Congressional laws on spending money are almost always constitutional. Some people like to pretend that the General Welfare is restricted in some way, but that's not what the Constitution said.
"restrictions on private ownership of armaments" - Whether the Second covers all armaments is debatable, but as I read it the ban on buying new automatic weapons is unconstitutional.
"standing military" - Where does it say that? Congress has explicit authority to maintain an army and a navy, with the restriction that no appropriations bill for the Army can be for more than two years. Congress also has authority to tax and spend for the Common Defense.
"war on drugs" - I find this to be really dubious, Constitutionally. We had a frippin' amendment to ban alcohol. The Feds can certainly finance anti-drug actions, including those of the states, and can regulate interstate commerce of drugs, but I don't see that the Federal Government has any authority to make drugs grown in one state and consumed there which are legal by state law illegal.
Dollars have some distinct advantages in the US.
I'm required to do basic accounting on my income in dollars. I can use whatever sort of trades or currency or whatever, but the IRS will require an accounting in dollars.
I'm required to pay taxes and government fees in dollars. Therefore, I need some.
If I win a civil court case, by far the most likely result is that I get a certain number of dollars.
On a larger scale, the US government is going to do its best to keep dollars as a useful currency.
Therefore, as a US citizen living and working in the US, dollars work a lot better than any other currency.
There are inherent disadvantages to Bitcoin, such as high transaction costs and long waiting times. While there can be high transaction costs and long waiting times when dealing with dollars, those are because the people doing the transaction can charge the fees and don't need to be efficient. Banks can set their transaction costs and inconvenience to be less than Bitcoin's if they see it as competition.
Blue-collar workers are very familiar with the reality that they typically live in. There is no a priori reason to think them more aware of reality where they don't typically go.
Blue-collar workers are, by definition, at the lowest levels of larger companies (since management is white-collar). If anything, they have less ability to see the bigger realities than white-collar workers.
That higher education makes people more critical is at least plausible. That it makes them more manipulative, more exploitative, and less honest is less plausible. I'm finding this a lot less plausible, and would like some sort of cite to confirm this.
They examined a large collection of tweets (about 22 million) to make up the list. There's no evidence that the tweets were selected by a biased process. The wording is a trifle unclear, but it looks like they got the sites from the tweets. If they got the list of known propaganda sites by an unbiased process, it's valid.
If fake news is overwhelmingly right-wing, then one would expect that a selection of propaganda websites would be overwhelmingly right-wing. If the propaganda websites are overwhelmingly right-wing, and the sites were selected by an apolitical process, that's an interesting result in itself. It doesn't invalidate the study. Read the abstract: it says that the identified propaganda sites were primarily Trump supporters and extreme right-wing people.
No, this means coming up with hypotheses that might be testable.
Sure. Most transgender people I'm aware of just get what they need and go on with life. However, there are people who don't like transsexuals for some reason, and deny their existence, accuse them of being mentally ill, and keep referring to them by inappropriate pronouns and names.
Someone probably already has made a suggestion like growth hormone for girls and malnutrition for boys. It's amazing the range of crackpot opinions you can get. No group with any actual power is going to push them.
I like the metric "Does shit get done? Is it good shit?", and wish it were used more. There are some jobs where it's easily measurable. A factory worker might make sixty widgets in a day, and a random five may pass quality control. There are other jobs which require cooperation and teamwork, and it's difficult to attribute that to individuals. In the case of software development, it's hard to know if it is good for some time. Something that works just fine might have security holes and completely unintelligible code.
Therefore, employers employ proxy measurements instead of actual productivity, and those are a lot more subjective. Working extra hours is seen as dedication rather than semi-incompetence or being bad at time management. (On-call is relevant to the business.) Soft skills, which can be very important in keeping teams running smoothly, can be undervalued (and probably are frequently). On the opposite side, it seems to be easier to get rid of someone for lack of technical skills than in bad social skills that undermine other people's performance.
Heck, if employers were interested in getting good stuff done, they would work at getting employees to do that, rather than going with the business fad of the year. Open-plan offices for software developers is not generally a good idea, but it's trendy, or at least used to be. One of the things I like about my current job is the relative lack of crap involved in doing good stuff.
Communist regimes have always placed a lot of emphasis on the state in practice, but not just the state. Stalin, for example, appealed to patriotism.
If you would like to provide some evidence that white males staying dominant and favoring policies that support them is any less identity politics as another racial group trying to achieve equality, please do. Until then, it would appear that "identity politics" is politics based on racial or ethnic or religious groups that you don't approve of.
I mean the people who get their information from Party-approved lies, and who are willing to believe the wildest things about their Party's opponents. It was obvious to all that Trump was the biggest liar in the race. His supporters disregarded that. Trump appealed to his supporters by emotion and lying, promising people what they wanted far more flagrantly than other candidates. He didn't campaign on universal health care or social security (introduced by Otto von Bismarck, neither a Nazi nor any sort of socialist). His message was xenophobia and jobs, and that's quite reminiscent of Nazi propaganda.
I'll just go with your cite, which lists as its first definition "exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of price". Note the "or" there. Only one of the conditions need be true for something to be a monopoly as defined in the dictionary site you provided. That means that Microsoft is a monopoly if it has sufficient control to manipulate prices.
Ever been involved in a case where you were illegally discriminated against? I have. It's not nearly that simple. The recruiter told me they were going to extend a job offer, I was asked for my birth date for a background investigation, and then nobody had ever said anything about a job offer, no sir, and nobody was interested in talking to me. I was then, as I am now, in the 40-65 age band, where discrimination is illegal.
I filed a complaint with the appropriate state agency, and then the company replied, saying pretty much what I'd claimed. I got a lawyer ($3K up front, and 1/3 of any winnings), who wrote a reply to that. The claim was denied based on their never having said anything about an offer (and the company had verified in its reply that they did mention it), and it wasn't worth going further.
Approximately no employer is going to fire you and cite grounds of race, sex, religion, or refusing sexual advances. They will come up with another reason. Fighting this will be at least moderately expensive, and it will be uncertain.
A statement that sexual harassment happens is a general statement, and easily substantiated with evidence. I can easily find a case of one woman who was sexually harassed. A statement that it's common does need evidence to support. Similarly, GP made a flat statement that it wasn't happening, and that is a definite claim that does ask for evidence - and the evidence says it's wrong.
Now, can you prove that harassment is not occurring? Lack of evidence doesn't show anything one way or another. I've been in lots of discussions about things that might or might not be happening. The wording can get a little odd, of course.
And, again, you make a very large and sweeping assumption. Since we can definitely find women who have been sexually harassed, it's also a false one.
It's possible to make a claim sincerely when the evidence just isn't there, and it's possible to be right. If you don't have evidence, you don't know who's lying and/or misunderstanding.
Actually, no. Some can be subtle. Getting slightly within her personal space or other dominance moves, spending a little extra time looking at her boobs and crotch, making what one person claims is a joke and the other person considers harassment, no individual action that's clearly out of line. It can add up.
National Socialism stood for getting rid of Jews, and treating other races as inferiors. They weren't all that subtle about it.
Being treated equal by the law is not being treated equally by the justice system. There's all sorts of room for prejudice by police, prosecutors, and judges. The net result seems to be that men will be treated more harshly than women, despite the law being the same.
Murder is murder, but there's lesser crimes that appear to demonstrate sexual discrimination.
There's a problem with how you're wording it.
Men and women, to a large extent, have the same rights. That doesn't mean society isn't sexist, that they can do the same things.
Historical example: For a long time, women had the same right to vote and the same right to run for public office as men. Generally, they didn't run. Minnesota's first Congresswoman lost her seat over a "Come home, Coya!" campaign that was based on the idea that women belonged in the house, not the House. Obviously, things are much better now. Are female politicians still at a disadvantage because they're female? My guess would be "yes", but it's hard to find good evidence.
The fact that you see the mission accomplished across the board, when there's still discrimination going on, suggests that it's still necessary. It's not necessary to get rid of sexist laws, by and large, but continuing work on attitudes is useful. Sexism was heavily ingrained into the culture not that long ago, and such things die hard.
Some people seized on the gender pay gap as evidence of sexism, not wanting to go deeper. Some people seize on the first reports that say the gender pay gap is due to certain reasons, not wanting to go deeper. For example, pay varies between jobs, and reports on the pay gap often say that men go into higher-paid occupations. Why are those occupations paid more? Historically, female-dominated professions tended to pay less than male-dominated professions, for no obvious reason. Are we truly beyond that? I'd say more research is needed.
There are definitions of monopoly that don't require 100% market share. They're in general more useful, because they define monopolies by their effects, rather than by specifying a criterion none of them meet. If you took micro-economics, you probably remember the difference between market prices and monopoly prices. Being a market leader is not the same thing, since if a market leader screws up people will go to the competition. When Microsoft screws up, people complain and still buy MS Windows and MS Office, for the most part.
Do you actually want electrical distribution competitions? Do you want two companies running wires everywhere? For above-ground distribution, it's necessary to space out wires. Power poles have crossbars, to keep physical distance between the neutral wire and the power wire(s) (it's normally distributed in three currents 120 degrees out of phase with each other, but individual phases can split off). Underground wire means more digging things up. It's going to be expensive.
Communism wasn't trying to tear down people's beliefs in things other than the state (it was generally anti-religion), and the idea was to get people in one class so everybody was part of the same group. Communism (and Socialism in general) tended to want to eliminate identity politics by having people share the same identity. I've seen very little in the way of post-modernism as you describe, and it's easy to ignore.
The rise of identity politics in America was on racial lines. White males were on top, white females should be subservient, blacks were inferior, and the natives were to be genocided. It's been around ever since. The only reason you don't perceive it is that the people you identify with were on top. Currently, there are various identities, and the old white male Christian supremacy is challenged, so some white male Christians have to attack the changing situation. Taking offense at little things is the reverse of carelessly insulting and disrespecting people. There are also too few post-modernists that fit your description to enforce any of that.
I have studied Hitler's rise to power, and I'm worried. Trump certainly isn't Hitler, but a lot of his supporters look a lot like Hitler supporters in their mindset. The neo-Nazis, as you say, don't have the numbers or appeal to be successful, but the right wing as a whole has numbers, and seems to want to follow a fickle authoritarian leader and believe or disbelieve as he says. If the hard-core Trump supporters were under 10%, I wouldn't be worried.