Eh, but that very assertion does fit the model of ingroup/outgroup thinking that creates the damaging behavior your describe. I would say at most that republicans are statistically more likely to engage in that kind of thinking, and only slightly. It's a broken part of human nature that requires active mental awareness to counter.
The moment you think you're just better about it than [other people] you've failed in your duty against prejudice. I'd say from my own experience that only about 5% of people really consistently engage in healthy self-awareness about it, and I wouldn't choose me to pick them out.
I'm pretty left of Obama on a lot of issues. Of course I know there are reasons not to like him. 40% of your party thinking he's Muslim is pretty much just his race. Sorry. There is a definite racist element that has swung into overdrive within the republican party. It's not imagined. If you go to top republican forums(like free republic or tea party community) your chance of finding posts denigrating black people without any sort of qualification are actually pretty high.
That's not the fault of the republicans who aren't racist, and I wouldn't be the kind of person who'd go "Republican==Racist", just that there is a neo-racist element that has really come into substantial prominence quite recently. Don't take it so personally, please. Please?
Also, I'd love to hear which policies(other than Drone usage which is terrible) concern you so much. You know, the real policies he actually has.
Which wasn't really his fault. I don't blame McCain for that. The racists practically screamed constantly in favor of republicans for as long as Obama was clearly a contender. Obama's mere existence metastasized a racism cancer that was already in the GOP, through no action on their own part.
In 2010 when they embraced that broadly, that's where they started being culpable.
Well, and there was McCain swinging around to support a lot of the republicans' worst ideas to win the primary. Say what you want about Obama, his bad ideas are pretty much entirely his own, and don't represent the extreme left in even the slightest.
I don't care if it passes. The fact is that it would be too-little too-late for me to care about television anymore. The advertisements you pay for, the terrible reality television, the death of educational programming, and the underlying vacuousness, even if they were partially caused by "free money" streams from package deals, aren't going to be reversed by suddenly making them fight for the percentage of their audience who will take advantage of this.
TV is dead, and the small pieces of legitimately good television can be gotten through the internet. It's too late to save cable.
Yep, the federal government never prosecutes identity theft. Right? They sure as heck don't have a huge anti-fraud division of the FBI. I get that there's plenty to be cynical about in our government, and most of that flows back to a combination of our electorate's stupidity and a locked-in broken system for elections. That doesn't mean there aren't elements of law and government that are actually intended to do some good.
It's really easy to be cynical about everything but that's just another kind of self-delusion.
That's really kind of an emotional reaction. There's a lot of value in having a way to undeniably prove your identity in the eyes of the law. It could help a lot with identity theft and identification wipe-out(like your house burning down). I don't think the benefits outweigh the costs in this case, but not everything that represents more information is bad.
You should feel bad for your post. You won't, because you like lying to yourself. We all do. But god-damn that's a complete fabrication on your part.
That's entirely untrue. Did you actually go past the summary of first fucking study? Abstract of study number 2:
After controlling for poverty and urbanization, for every age group, across the United States, people in states with many guns have elevated rates of suicide, particularly firearm suicide.
Emphasis mine. Literally demonstrates the opposite of what you said is true. Why? I mean, international comparisons do have some validity when controls are placed, but merged statistics are fairly useless a means of understanding causation.
Gun owning households are more likely to have suicides(especially gun suicides), but no more likely to have suicidal thoughts. That's an incredibly damning fact, and cross cultural comparisons are no match.
Why do you assume zero? I think you'll find defunding mental health treatment wasn't a liberal policy.
Moreover, the data shows that lack of gun availability really does reduce suicide rate(page with a list of citations covering numerous different examinations of this ), but we're not allowed to research that in the U.S. Generally speaking suicides are impulsive acts, and the person committing suicide isn't willing to go through a complicated process to do so. Mental health treatment for suicidal thoughts, however, hasn't been shown to dramatically affect suicide rates(though it does work for other things).
Just because what you're saying sounds nice and protects guns doesn't mean it does anyone any good. (And I think there's no point to gun control without repealing/altering the 2nd amendment)
Sure, in the long run, every element of culture is doomed to decay, and on the internet that process is a little more rapid. I didn't mean to imply that Facebook was eternal, just that people will put up with a lot until there actually is an alternative with all their friends.
Just like the mafia: when you "lose protection", it's not an external threat but the mafia that does you harm. If one could simply opt out of government like you describe, many would.
If you opt out of the mafia, they kill you. If you opt out of the Government, you get arrested(usually for tax evasion). We have the better of two choices here.
You think you've stumbled on something I'm not aware of. If we got rid of the government, something very much like the mafia would outright replace it because that's how power vacuums work. That happens in every country where the government disappears(recently, Iraq, Somalia, in the 80s: Afghanistan). New, more malevolent, self-interested governments run by the wealthy and powerful are the natural result of a lack of government. It took us fucking millennia of incremental and revolutionary changes to get from petty dictatorships to liberal democracies, and those are far from universal. It took centuries for liberal democracies to deal with tremendous social injustice like racism.
An incrementally less abusive or more responsive government is a good goal for one human lifetime. That's not what you're doing
Anyone who sat through previous Facebook abuse will sit through this. They have a monopoly on your friends. That's a hell of a thing to overcome. I deal with it by only ever talking to the friends I'm quite close to and leaving everyone else to themselves in the modern social networking era.
Agreeing to contracts before they're valid is a part of the social contract.
It can't be part of the social contract, because I never agreed before you considered it "valid" yet you still choose to enforce it.
Says who? Without some fundamental basis of society, there is no reason to assume anything. You don't accept it, that's fine, you just have to bear the consequences, which are usually represented with society kicking your ass, just because larger, more organized groups can.
The social contract is invalid because it lacks consent. That same consent would be required for anything else, like killing me. Same rule here, and it applies equally to everyone, I don't even know where you got that thing about my limitations personally... Anarchy != chaos.
You're mistaking your invented ethical system for pragmatic reality. Reality is this thing that goes an intrudes on all your clever ideas that work "in theory." Consent isn't actually required for anything. It's enforced as part of the society we live in. You don't have the implicit and internal ability to stop someone from killing you. To pretend otherwise is an adolescent power fantasy.
We are by-and-large stuck up pricks who don't understand social contract theory, it's all about freedom.
Quite right - we never agreed to such a "contract" and thus it is invalid. The emperor has no clothes!
Agreeing to contracts before they're valid is a part of the social contract. I don't know what you're trying to prove here. The state without the contract is indeed "you can do whatever you want" but so can anyone else, including killing you, and defiling your corpse in a way most offensive to your personal beliefs. You seem to feel entitled to everyone else's limitations, but not your own. Yours seems like a child's outlook to me.
You know, it really helps a debate when every single point you make is followed by telling the readers they're idiots. It just drives home the fact that a smarter person wouldn't be reading your post.
I always love these self loathing diatribes. You realize, if I substituted "us Americans" with "jews", or "blacks" or even "left handed dwarves", you'd get pounded for being a twit.
Racism by word substitution? Oh my no! Next you'll point out to me that, in fact, we're not all the same in this country, and have a diverse set of opinions and thought? Remember, you can't judge all lawyers, all criminals, all wealthy persons, all nazis, as a group.
Of course you can't, but unlike race, being an American has a degree of accepted social identity that one can lampoon, without necessarily engaging in the assertion that it actually apply to all people. When our schools stop teaching all students that "Freedom is what America is all about" as propoganda, it will be a little easier to say that that's an unacceptable thing to harp on.
1) I'm aware of the distinction, and I left the ambiguity on purpose. The same mentality can benefit both styles. 2) I'd agree, but with the caveat that there can be fun contests. Most of the time, they're not, but it could be.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mixed up Arabs and Muslims there. Don't do that, please.
Eh, but that very assertion does fit the model of ingroup/outgroup thinking that creates the damaging behavior your describe. I would say at most that republicans are statistically more likely to engage in that kind of thinking, and only slightly. It's a broken part of human nature that requires active mental awareness to counter.
The moment you think you're just better about it than [other people] you've failed in your duty against prejudice. I'd say from my own experience that only about 5% of people really consistently engage in healthy self-awareness about it, and I wouldn't choose me to pick them out.
I'm pretty left of Obama on a lot of issues. Of course I know there are reasons not to like him. 40% of your party thinking he's Muslim is pretty much just his race. Sorry. There is a definite racist element that has swung into overdrive within the republican party. It's not imagined. If you go to top republican forums(like free republic or tea party community) your chance of finding posts denigrating black people without any sort of qualification are actually pretty high.
That's not the fault of the republicans who aren't racist, and I wouldn't be the kind of person who'd go "Republican==Racist", just that there is a neo-racist element that has really come into substantial prominence quite recently. Don't take it so personally, please. Please?
Also, I'd love to hear which policies(other than Drone usage which is terrible) concern you so much. You know, the real policies he actually has.
Which wasn't really his fault. I don't blame McCain for that. The racists practically screamed constantly in favor of republicans for as long as Obama was clearly a contender. Obama's mere existence metastasized a racism cancer that was already in the GOP, through no action on their own part.
In 2010 when they embraced that broadly, that's where they started being culpable.
Well, and there was McCain swinging around to support a lot of the republicans' worst ideas to win the primary. Say what you want about Obama, his bad ideas are pretty much entirely his own, and don't represent the extreme left in even the slightest.
I don't care if it passes. The fact is that it would be too-little too-late for me to care about television anymore. The advertisements you pay for, the terrible reality television, the death of educational programming, and the underlying vacuousness, even if they were partially caused by "free money" streams from package deals, aren't going to be reversed by suddenly making them fight for the percentage of their audience who will take advantage of this.
TV is dead, and the small pieces of legitimately good television can be gotten through the internet. It's too late to save cable.
Yep, the federal government never prosecutes identity theft. Right? They sure as heck don't have a huge anti-fraud division of the FBI. I get that there's plenty to be cynical about in our government, and most of that flows back to a combination of our electorate's stupidity and a locked-in broken system for elections. That doesn't mean there aren't elements of law and government that are actually intended to do some good.
It's really easy to be cynical about everything but that's just another kind of self-delusion.
That's really kind of an emotional reaction. There's a lot of value in having a way to undeniably prove your identity in the eyes of the law. It could help a lot with identity theft and identification wipe-out(like your house burning down). I don't think the benefits outweigh the costs in this case, but not everything that represents more information is bad.
I think invoking Stallman at all is something of a joke these days.
You should feel bad for your post. You won't, because you like lying to yourself. We all do. But god-damn that's a complete fabrication on your part.
That's entirely untrue. Did you actually go past the summary of first fucking study? Abstract of study number 2:
Emphasis mine. Literally demonstrates the opposite of what you said is true. Why? I mean, international comparisons do have some validity when controls are placed, but merged statistics are fairly useless a means of understanding causation.
Gun owning households are more likely to have suicides(especially gun suicides), but no more likely to have suicidal thoughts. That's an incredibly damning fact, and cross cultural comparisons are no match.
Why do you assume zero? I think you'll find defunding mental health treatment wasn't a liberal policy.
Moreover, the data shows that lack of gun availability really does reduce suicide rate(page with a list of citations covering numerous different examinations of this ), but we're not allowed to research that in the U.S. Generally speaking suicides are impulsive acts, and the person committing suicide isn't willing to go through a complicated process to do so. Mental health treatment for suicidal thoughts, however, hasn't been shown to dramatically affect suicide rates(though it does work for other things).
Just because what you're saying sounds nice and protects guns doesn't mean it does anyone any good. (And I think there's no point to gun control without repealing/altering the 2nd amendment)
No, I'm pretty sure I meant the genitive.
Sure, in the long run, every element of culture is doomed to decay, and on the internet that process is a little more rapid. I didn't mean to imply that Facebook was eternal, just that people will put up with a lot until there actually is an alternative with all their friends.
Just like the mafia: when you "lose protection", it's not an external threat but the mafia that does you harm. If one could simply opt out of government like you describe, many would.
If you opt out of the mafia, they kill you. If you opt out of the Government, you get arrested(usually for tax evasion). We have the better of two choices here.
You think you've stumbled on something I'm not aware of. If we got rid of the government, something very much like the mafia would outright replace it because that's how power vacuums work. That happens in every country where the government disappears(recently, Iraq, Somalia, in the 80s: Afghanistan). New, more malevolent, self-interested governments run by the wealthy and powerful are the natural result of a lack of government. It took us fucking millennia of incremental and revolutionary changes to get from petty dictatorships to liberal democracies, and those are far from universal. It took centuries for liberal democracies to deal with tremendous social injustice like racism.
An incrementally less abusive or more responsive government is a good goal for one human lifetime. That's not what you're doing
Anyone who sat through previous Facebook abuse will sit through this. They have a monopoly on your friends. That's a hell of a thing to overcome. I deal with it by only ever talking to the friends I'm quite close to and leaving everyone else to themselves in the modern social networking era.
Agreeing to contracts before they're valid is a part of the social contract.
It can't be part of the social contract, because I never agreed before you considered it "valid" yet you still choose to enforce it.
Says who? Without some fundamental basis of society, there is no reason to assume anything. You don't accept it, that's fine, you just have to bear the consequences, which are usually represented with society kicking your ass, just because larger, more organized groups can.
The social contract is invalid because it lacks consent. That same consent would be required for anything else, like killing me. Same rule here, and it applies equally to everyone, I don't even know where you got that thing about my limitations personally... Anarchy != chaos.
You're mistaking your invented ethical system for pragmatic reality. Reality is this thing that goes an intrudes on all your clever ideas that work "in theory." Consent isn't actually required for anything. It's enforced as part of the society we live in. You don't have the implicit and internal ability to stop someone from killing you. To pretend otherwise is an adolescent power fantasy.
Cars, OTOH, have never been called "driving machines".
Remind me again what BMW's tagline is?
Uh huh, sure. You've got some magic statistics 101 disproof of climatology now. Grand.
Tedious and dangerous. A combination practically designed to induce stress.
We are by-and-large stuck up pricks who don't understand social contract theory, it's all about freedom.
Quite right - we never agreed to such a "contract" and thus it is invalid. The emperor has no clothes!
Agreeing to contracts before they're valid is a part of the social contract. I don't know what you're trying to prove here. The state without the contract is indeed "you can do whatever you want" but so can anyone else, including killing you, and defiling your corpse in a way most offensive to your personal beliefs. You seem to feel entitled to everyone else's limitations, but not your own. Yours seems like a child's outlook to me.
You know, it really helps a debate when every single point you make is followed by telling the readers they're idiots. It just drives home the fact that a smarter person wouldn't be reading your post.
I always love these self loathing diatribes.
You realize, if I substituted "us Americans" with "jews", or "blacks" or even "left handed dwarves", you'd get pounded for being a twit.
Racism by word substitution? Oh my no! Next you'll point out to me that, in fact, we're not all the same in this country, and have a diverse set of opinions and thought? Remember, you can't judge all lawyers, all criminals, all wealthy persons, all nazis, as a group.
Of course you can't, but unlike race, being an American has a degree of accepted social identity that one can lampoon, without necessarily engaging in the assertion that it actually apply to all people. When our schools stop teaching all students that "Freedom is what America is all about" as propoganda, it will be a little easier to say that that's an unacceptable thing to harp on.
By the way, if the laws are protecting you, how can you be dead from them?
Usually because they're also protecting someone else?
1) I'm aware of the distinction, and I left the ambiguity on purpose. The same mentality can benefit both styles.
2) I'd agree, but with the caveat that there can be fun contests. Most of the time, they're not, but it could be.
I see. I think I'll embrace your strategy of being antagonistic of everyone I talk to instead, because that's so much better for good communication.