Most of the Americans who react like this are just tired. They're tired of their country being the butt of every dumb joke for the last half century. They're tired of every comment about their country being that it's a vile racist shithole. They're tired of the entire world looking down on their country
Here's a novel idea, if you don't like how your country is perceived, stereotype or not... Why do you do something to change it.
America and Americans are perceived like that because you behave like that. I mean you only need to look at you sig to understand why we think you're all backwards and confused, it couldn't be more wrong if you tried.. Your president and the Alt-Right are demonstrating that yes, the US is a racist shithole. The level of crime and poverty, specifically the gap between rich and poor are things we expect to see in third world nations.
I'm risking a mod down (probably more than risking) from the uber-jingoists here, but realistically you remain the butt of dumb jokes because you're reinforcing the stereotypes.
Or you could do something as mindbogglingly progressive and sane as instead of getting all offended and hot under the collar about the jokes, roll with them. I'm an Australian who wears a cork brimmed hat and drinks Fosters (despite doing neither of those things), I've got a German mate who's strategy is to mention the war and do the Monty Python sketch straight off the bat to get it out of the way (he's a good bloke BTW). I live in the UK, where oddly enough, teeth seem pretty damn good and electronics are reliable, it's true that brits do love to queue though. Learn to laugh at yourselves instead of being butt-hurt.
And yes, I've been to the US, I love Americans like brothers (brothers who live very far away, erm... that's called "tongue in cheek" humour) and have visited there before (in fact I'll be back in October) and I've always wondered where you hide the racist arseholes we see online because I've never met an American like that in person in the US.
I can't see how this can possibly work in eg Malta, Luxembourg and Cyprus, countries which are very small so will have almost no local content either back catalogue or current production. Just means Netflix etc will never do business there.
Luxembourg can choose German, Italian and French content, like they currently do. Cyprus will depend if you're on the Greek or Turkish side, Malta, Spanish or British...
Do you think these countries had no local broadcasters before... or are you daft enough to assume that all they played were American movies?
Paycheck isn't a perk its contractual. Health care, likewise is often considered to be part of the compensation package.
For most of the world, health care isn't provided by our employers. We'd hate for our employers to have almost quite literally, the power of life and death over us.
However, I live in the UK. There is little natural light at the best of times so I'd windows are pretty far down on the list compared to flexible hours and climate control.
I'm pretty sure that the golden rule of Slashdot has always been Voltaire's line about defending speech one disagrees with.
What planet is the Slashdot you're accessing located on?
Because the golden rule on this Slashdot is "If you dare post something that disagrees with the current received "progressive" groupfeelz, we will mod you to oblivion! Because no-platforming, you RAAAAACIS' Nazi!"
He's closer to the Slashdot you're on... Because here if you dare criticise people for being hateful little shits or pointing out the flaws in Trumps administration you'll get modded down.
Just try saying that FREEZE PEACH doesn't protect you from criticism, let alone applying that to Alex Jones and you'll be modded into oblivion in no time.
the obvious solution to this is to have partitions inside the ship, to limit the amount of shift possible.
Also, picking "the right ship for the job" such that your cargo comes as close as possible to completely filling the hold to the top, to limit the amount of possible shifting.
Baffles will increase mass, weight and make loading and unloading of cargo much slower.
As for the second point, what will all the specialised ships do whilst not being employed for a single task? Freighters cost millions to make, every day they sit empty or idle is a day they're costing money.
The best and simplest solution is to find out why cargoes are liquefying, its not something that happens that often. 10 ships a year. There are an estimated 11,000 bulk carriers in service.
Possession of cannabis is punishable by up to 5 years in the UK.
However unlike the US, the UK does not lock up drug users. Dealers, sure, but users end up getting a misdemeanour fine and possibly an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO).
Cannabis is practically defacto legal in the UK. Cops have better things to do over here.
If... the driver merges into the right lane and slows down
Which should only happen after a turn signal is activated, and a head and mirror check. Right?
Well the indicator should only go on after mirrors have been checked and if it is safe. So I cant imainge Telsa managing to install automated indicators without installing driver monitoring (which they are adamant they don't need)
Two people arriving at the same time is easy, and there is a rule to account for it.
The driver on the right has right of way. So it's only a problem when 4 cars show up at once, which almost never actually happens. If traffic is heavy enough on both roads for it to happen regularly the intersection should have traffic signals rather than stop signs.
This is never an issue in countries with sane road design as we give one road priority over the other or use roundabouts so if 4 cars approach at the same time, all four can enter the intersection at the same times.
Traffic lights create congestion, so over use creates ever increasing traffic jams.
Even without mindless string matching, there are pinhead bureaucrats who will equally mindlessly reject reasonable requests for harmless strings on similarly specious grounds. A few years back, seeing that it was (by some miracle, I thought) untaken, I tried to snag "YT-1300" as a personalized license place. Yes, I'm that nerdly. Also, nothing good with "1701" was available. Some pencil-pusher at the DMV actually denied the application on the claim that YT-1300 is a "gang-related" term. WTF?!?!? Yeah. I'm to believe that there're gangs of Star Wars fans out there somewhere doing drive-bys at Star Trek conventions, hoping to "pop a cap in the ass" of the Trekkies. Sure Mr. DMV person. And you wonder why we all hate you and your kind.
Okay. Disney may have had something to say on copyright or trademark grounds if I *HAD* gotten the plate. But still...
I believe YT = Whitey.
Although first I thought YT-1300 = Millennium Falcon, because I am also that nerdy (all of the devices on my home network are named after star clusters).
Does it take a company as big as WeightWatchers to convince curators/censors to make an exception to the Scunthorpe problem? Like Scunthorpe, WeightWatchers has embedded sexual slang in the middle.
Yes but in English English, Twat is a 2 out of 11 for offensiveness, Cunt is 10 our of 11. Twat indicates a mild annoyance at best.
I believe only Australian English has a word that is 12 out of 11 though.
It's called the Scunthorpe problem because it has the word "cunt" in it, and that prevented the good people of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England from creating accounts with AOL back when that was relevant.
There, saved y'all a click, since that's probably the only thing you were interested in about this story anyway.
Same with Yahoo (or possibly Hotmail) preventing people from signing up with Allah in their name in the mid 00's. My friend Stuart Callahan decided to go with GMail instead.
Posting a liknk to Breitbart is more or less equivalent to saying "my pisshead mates down the pub told me". I mean sure, it might be true, but neither lends more credibility to the claim.
Good sir, that analogy is completely incorrect.
A person tends to lie less as they become more and more inebriated, as inhibitions break down and mental acuity slows the ability to keep lies straight and truth hidden lessens, as the old saying goes "in vino veritas" (in wine there is the truth).
Linking to Brietbart is like saying "The smelly, compulsive liar at work who makes your skin crawl said".
If I received two conflicting pieces of information, one from Brietbart and one from a crazy and clearly drunk hobo, I'd believe the hobo.
That would be the problem with people at the political extremes. They are so far to their own side that everything else looks far left or far right by comparison.
I think that these people tend to be the noisiest as well, which makes those extremes appear far larger or more important than they really are.
That is indeed a huge issue nobody in the US except a very few seem to acknowledge. Conservatism and traditional values in the US have gone to shit.
The US had a conservative president who embodied traditional values. He was a married, religious family man from the middle-class with a spotless political career and social engagement, he reached out to the opposition party to move forward on bipartisan issues... but conservatives hated him because he was a Democrat and he was black.
Now the US has a "conservative" president who was divorced two times, he did not serve in the military or a political career, has had various affairs with porn stars and models, grew up as an entitled rich-kid, frequently disrespects women with sexually charged commentary and is so self-centered that he spends most of his days checking what people are saying about him on the news... but conservatives love him because.... I don't know. He's as morally depraved as they are?
There was time of real Republican conservatism as embodied by the likes of senator John McCain. This conservatism cared about the middle-class and lower incomes, about traditional family values and also about international alliances, fairness towards partners, the rule of law, honoring treaties and also listening to facts and reason.
That Republican party is no more. It has been hijacked by the right-wing populists who push agendas and fake news (all the while accusing their opponents of doing exactly that in attempt to muddle the minds by pulling everyone else to their low standards). It has solemnly sacrificed logic, reason and the traditional values for some kind of modern, right-wing dadaism that rejects all social norms and values.
The current president and his favorite news channel (Fox) embodies this state that conservatism has morphed into, perfectly.
What I don't understand is, why nobody in conservative America is standing up to all of this bullshit. John McCain was, and now he's dead.
That's actually the traditional meaning of conservative. They represented the old guard, the landed elite, lords and barons, the old money. Progressives used to represent the middle class and new money, industrialists, innovators and the average skilled worker. The period of conservatism in the cold war was the anomaly, unfortunately during that period, the last remnants of progressive politics died.
Now conservatism has returned to it's roots, the elites are back in charge and the hoi polloi are falling in line like they're meant to. It doesn't matter how idiotic or depraved Trump is, he's one of them, the ruling elite and that's all that matters.
According to Top Gear, going around corners is a problem with US car design as they are only able to go blisteringly fast in a straight line:)
There actually is a lot of truth to that. Compared to European cars in the Clarkson/Hammond/May era, many US cars had worse handling than a river barge. Up until this generation, the Ford Mustang had a live rear axle which really limited it's turning ability, it understeered more than my FWD Honda Integra, right up until the moment it oversteered (and not in a good way like my Nissan 200sx). At least when GM re-launched the Camaro, instead of bolting bits of Detroit together, they went to GM Holden Australia who knew about this thing called "multi-link suspension", even then the whole thing was based on a boat called the Holden Commordore.
I'm not sure if the current gen Mustang is any better as I haven't driven one but European cars are lighter and usually handle much better (weight is the enemy of good driving dynamics).
pseudoscience: a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method
Where in the name of Zombie Feinman's ghost did you get that definition.
Wikipedia describes it as:
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that are claimed to be both scientific and factual, but are incompatible with the scientific method.
The OED defines it as:
"1. As a count noun: a spurious or pretended science; a branch of knowledge or a system of beliefs mistakenly regarded as based on scientific method or having the status of scientific truth."
"2. As a mass noun: spurious or pretended science; study or research that is claimed as scientific but is not generally accepted as such. Chiefly derogatory."
Pseudoscience is the technical name for quackery, colloquially it is used to mock things that pretend to be scientific but actually have no basis in science.
Who modded that tripe up and have you taken your watered down snake oil today?
they're not realizing otherwise. They're getting scared of losing what little they have and turning conservative. Meanwhile the mega-corporations run their candidates on conservative rhetoric (all the while pushing radical policies like starting wars with nations that didn't attack us, forcing arbitration on us all and giving themselves massive subsidies while fighting against anything that would increase wages).
But even that's not really a problem. Polls show Americans support single payer healthcare. They support the "New New Deal" and ending the 8 wars we're fighting (again, against nations that have never once attacked us). But _voters_ OTOH... they're not so sure.
The point of mandatory voting isn't get get young folks to vote. It's to end voter suppression. I waited 3 hours in line to vote for Bernie in my primary. That was not an accident. In my state there were police stationed in riot gear outside polls in poor (and especially black) neighborhoods. And now we've got this Voter Id crap whree they just make it so you can't get an Id if you're not somebody who's "supposed" to vote.
Make voting mandatory and that goes away.
What makes you think mandatory voting will fix anything?
The laziest part of the great masses of the people are just going to do the minimum required of them. They'll go in and tick a box, at most they will vote for whomever their favourite media personality tells them to.
Australia has mandatory voting, we've got all the same problems with regards to advertising, policies based on vote winning than doing anything for the good of Australia. You end up with parties being elected because they ran a good scare campaign just like in the US. America however has two major issues that aren't in Australia or the UK (where voting isn't mandatory).
1. The electoral collage. Voting is meaningless when someone without a name or accountability can add weighting to it and change the result.
2. Lack of 3rd parties. The only thing keeping Australian or British govts honest are the fact that they often end up depending on 3rd parties, preventing them from ruling by fiat until the next election.
" But something has to be done to counterbalance old folks with dementia being manipulated into voting for things they don't actually want because they can't understand. "
No worries man, we got you covered. We have armies of unjaded, fresh, young voters who vote ( if you can pull them away from their phones long enough ) not based on any educated ideology, but rather who is popular or who promises them the world when election time rolls around.
They're still full of hope. They believe their vote actually means something in the grand scheme of things and their candidate is the political equal to the second coming of $deity.
It takes a few election cycles for them to realize otherwise but hey, by that time we'll have a fresh batch of new voters to prey upon. ..
The lesson here is: Age is irrelevant when you're outnumbered by the inexperienced or gullible.
Welcome to Democracy or, at least it's what we are supposed to believe.
You do know that young voters are the least represented age group. Old voters are pandered to as they're more likely to vote, middle aged are the most buttered up in terms of concessions and welfare as that's essentially two votes for one perk. Young voters can be ignored until they're in their 30's and have pushed out a kid and want that sweet, sweet child benefit perk.
So this is a quibble over the definition of "fit" and whether it means physically fit or more generally fit? Fine. We'll call it survival-of-the-most-able-to-reach-reproducing-age-in-good-health-and-pass-on-genes. Or SOTMATRRAIGHAPOG, for those who like acronyms. That rolls off the tongue much better.
Maybe they meant the Honda Fit. That would make just as much sense as what Darwin actually said was: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change" which some how morphed into "survival of the fittest" which used fit in the context of "Well adapted or suited to the conditions or circumstances" [copy/paste from the OED]
It's not "instead of fittest". Sluggishness might be the best adaptation to an environment, so it could literally be what is meant by "survival of the fittest" in that environment. "Fittest" does not mean the most jacked.
Darwin never actually said "fittest" either. What he said was "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change". This doesn't seem to contradict that at all. A species that can conserve its energy will be more adaptable when changes occur.
But he's far less of an evil than Holocaust deniers and actual Nazis.
Actual Nazis, yes. Holocaust deniers, no. Actual Nazis were dangerous not because of their words, but their actions. It was the fact that they murdered millions of innocent people that made them evil and dangerous, not their speech. Holocaust deniers are not nearly as dangerous as those that would attempt to control the teaching of history through legislation.
Erm... You do know that controlling the teaching of history (as well as many other things) through legislation is EXACTLY what fascist regiemes do right?
They literally had bonfires where banned material was burned, people were encouraged to join in and those that didn't were watched, added to lists, arrested when their nationalism was bought into question.
Fascists believe in both direct action and palingenesis. Direct action is enforcement of political ideology through violence, we've seen plenty of this from the Alt-Right, palingenesis is rebirth, however specifically in this context it's the redefinition of language to mean something else. Alt-Right itself is one such re-definition. It was created by far right bigots to provide a friendlier name than racist or xenophobic whilst still being able to preach racism and xenophobia.
Words are most definitely harmful. Remember that the Nazis didn't just rise up out of nowhere, Hitler had been their spokesperson for years, making impassioned but inflammatory speeches in Munich beer halls for years before they had enough members to start beating up Bolsheviks openly (yep, before the Jews were even targeted, they wiped out Bolshevism in Germany... Nazis are the opposite to communists). Its the same with Mussolini, his speeches caused the march to Rome. Of course Mussolini never expected it to work so he ran off to Milan whilst that went on.
The rise of Fascism is going to do far more harm than any of our enemies could hope to if it isn't nipped in the bud.
Funny how hate-tinged your free speech advocacy is.
Thats the way it always is.
One of the defining points of a fascist is how they redefine the language to mean what they want it to mean. Hence Orwell's concept of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four which was his diatribe against Fascism (Animal Farm was his diatribe against Communism). People like the GP don't want free speech, that wold mean they'd have to tolerate to opposing points of view from so-called "SJWs". Instead they want to be able to say what they like and have everyone else silently agree with it.
I would rather not. There have been conspiracy groups forever. JFK assasinations, moon landings, UFOs, con-trails, you name it. It was _never_ a real threat until they started banning it. By banning it they have given more credibility to this guy than anything they could have ever done by just letting him get on his soap box weekly.
Except reality doesn't work that way. Being banned from a restaurant does not make you more powerful. It means you'll have to go to a different restaurant.
If you get banned from every restaurant in town, you need to admit that you have a problem.
Facebook, et al. are losing more users by not banning Infowars than by banning them.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the Americans who react like this are just tired. They're tired of their country being the butt of every dumb joke for the last half century. They're tired of every comment about their country being that it's a vile racist shithole. They're tired of the entire world looking down on their country
Here's a novel idea, if you don't like how your country is perceived, stereotype or not... Why do you do something to change it.
America and Americans are perceived like that because you behave like that. I mean you only need to look at you sig to understand why we think you're all backwards and confused, it couldn't be more wrong if you tried.. Your president and the Alt-Right are demonstrating that yes, the US is a racist shithole. The level of crime and poverty, specifically the gap between rich and poor are things we expect to see in third world nations.
I'm risking a mod down (probably more than risking) from the uber-jingoists here, but realistically you remain the butt of dumb jokes because you're reinforcing the stereotypes.
Or you could do something as mindbogglingly progressive and sane as instead of getting all offended and hot under the collar about the jokes, roll with them. I'm an Australian who wears a cork brimmed hat and drinks Fosters (despite doing neither of those things), I've got a German mate who's strategy is to mention the war and do the Monty Python sketch straight off the bat to get it out of the way (he's a good bloke BTW). I live in the UK, where oddly enough, teeth seem pretty damn good and electronics are reliable, it's true that brits do love to queue though. Learn to laugh at yourselves instead of being butt-hurt.
And yes, I've been to the US, I love Americans like brothers (brothers who live very far away, erm... that's called "tongue in cheek" humour) and have visited there before (in fact I'll be back in October) and I've always wondered where you hide the racist arseholes we see online because I've never met an American like that in person in the US.
I can't see how this can possibly work in eg Malta, Luxembourg and Cyprus, countries which are very small so will have almost no local content either back catalogue or current production. Just means Netflix etc will never do business there.
Luxembourg can choose German, Italian and French content, like they currently do. Cyprus will depend if you're on the Greek or Turkish side, Malta, Spanish or British... Do you think these countries had no local broadcasters before... or are you daft enough to assume that all they played were American movies?
Paycheck isn't a perk its contractual. Health care, likewise is often considered to be part of the compensation package.
For most of the world, health care isn't provided by our employers. We'd hate for our employers to have almost quite literally, the power of life and death over us.
However, I live in the UK. There is little natural light at the best of times so I'd windows are pretty far down on the list compared to flexible hours and climate control.
I'm pretty sure that the golden rule of Slashdot has always been Voltaire's line about defending speech one disagrees with.
What planet is the Slashdot you're accessing located on?
Because the golden rule on this Slashdot is "If you dare post something that disagrees with the current received "progressive" groupfeelz, we will mod you to oblivion! Because no-platforming, you RAAAAACIS' Nazi!"
He's closer to the Slashdot you're on... Because here if you dare criticise people for being hateful little shits or pointing out the flaws in Trumps administration you'll get modded down.
Just try saying that FREEZE PEACH doesn't protect you from criticism, let alone applying that to Alex Jones and you'll be modded into oblivion in no time.
the obvious solution to this is to have partitions inside the ship, to limit the amount of shift possible.
Also, picking "the right ship for the job" such that your cargo comes as close as possible to completely filling the hold to the top, to limit the amount of possible shifting.
Baffles will increase mass, weight and make loading and unloading of cargo much slower.
As for the second point, what will all the specialised ships do whilst not being employed for a single task? Freighters cost millions to make, every day they sit empty or idle is a day they're costing money.
The best and simplest solution is to find out why cargoes are liquefying, its not something that happens that often. 10 ships a year. There are an estimated 11,000 bulk carriers in service.
Possession of cannabis is punishable by up to 5 years in the UK.
However unlike the US, the UK does not lock up drug users. Dealers, sure, but users end up getting a misdemeanour fine and possibly an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO).
Cannabis is practically defacto legal in the UK. Cops have better things to do over here.
If ... the driver merges into the right lane and slows down
Which should only happen after a turn signal is activated, and a head and mirror check. Right?
Well the indicator should only go on after mirrors have been checked and if it is safe. So I cant imainge Telsa managing to install automated indicators without installing driver monitoring (which they are adamant they don't need)
Once you whack it on the head with a sledgehammer and disable all the rubbish app stuff, Windy 10 is ok.
Add Classic Shell / Classic Start (new open source name)
Use Winaero Tweaker.
Use Disable Win Tracking.
Add Aero Glass for Windows 8 (if that is your thing, needs a donation for no nag).
Add old calculator.
Give paint 3d the heave ho.
Add the old windows picture viewer.
Add back all the old sound schemes (some guy on deviantart has done this).
And be prepared to do this each and every time you update as each update puts all the crapware back in.
Two people arriving at the same time is easy, and there is a rule to account for it.
The driver on the right has right of way. So it's only a problem when 4 cars show up at once, which almost never actually happens. If traffic is heavy enough on both roads for it to happen regularly the intersection should have traffic signals rather than stop signs.
This is never an issue in countries with sane road design as we give one road priority over the other or use roundabouts so if 4 cars approach at the same time, all four can enter the intersection at the same times.
Traffic lights create congestion, so over use creates ever increasing traffic jams.
Even without mindless string matching, there are pinhead bureaucrats who will equally mindlessly reject reasonable requests for harmless strings on similarly specious grounds. A few years back, seeing that it was (by some miracle, I thought) untaken, I tried to snag "YT-1300" as a personalized license place. Yes, I'm that nerdly. Also, nothing good with "1701" was available. Some pencil-pusher at the DMV actually denied the application on the claim that YT-1300 is a "gang-related" term. WTF?!?!? Yeah. I'm to believe that there're gangs of Star Wars fans out there somewhere doing drive-bys at Star Trek conventions, hoping to "pop a cap in the ass" of the Trekkies. Sure Mr. DMV person. And you wonder why we all hate you and your kind.
Okay. Disney may have had something to say on copyright or trademark grounds if I *HAD* gotten the plate. But still...
I believe YT = Whitey.
Although first I thought YT-1300 = Millennium Falcon, because I am also that nerdy (all of the devices on my home network are named after star clusters).
Does it take a company as big as WeightWatchers to convince curators/censors to make an exception to the Scunthorpe problem? Like Scunthorpe, WeightWatchers has embedded sexual slang in the middle.
Yes but in English English, Twat is a 2 out of 11 for offensiveness, Cunt is 10 our of 11. Twat indicates a mild annoyance at best. I believe only Australian English has a word that is 12 out of 11 though.
It's called the Scunthorpe problem because it has the word "cunt" in it, and that prevented the good people of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England from creating accounts with AOL back when that was relevant.
There, saved y'all a click, since that's probably the only thing you were interested in about this story anyway.
Same with Yahoo (or possibly Hotmail) preventing people from signing up with Allah in their name in the mid 00's. My friend Stuart Callahan decided to go with GMail instead.
Facebook censors. [breitbart.com]
Posting a liknk to Breitbart is more or less equivalent to saying "my pisshead mates down the pub told me". I mean sure, it might be true, but neither lends more credibility to the claim.
Good sir, that analogy is completely incorrect.
A person tends to lie less as they become more and more inebriated, as inhibitions break down and mental acuity slows the ability to keep lies straight and truth hidden lessens, as the old saying goes "in vino veritas" (in wine there is the truth).
Linking to Brietbart is like saying "The smelly, compulsive liar at work who makes your skin crawl said".
If I received two conflicting pieces of information, one from Brietbart and one from a crazy and clearly drunk hobo, I'd believe the hobo.
No, he's not.
Public faith in journalism is good, not in singular journalists. There's a big difference there.
Good journalism is the basis of a free democracy, when journalists are manipulated, freedom is lost.
Sadly manipulation in US journalism is routine... and almost none of it is by government agencies.
That would be the problem with people at the political extremes. They are so far to their own side that everything else looks far left or far right by comparison.
I think that these people tend to be the noisiest as well, which makes those extremes appear far larger or more important than they really are.
That is indeed a huge issue nobody in the US except a very few seem to acknowledge. Conservatism and traditional values in the US have gone to shit.
The US had a conservative president who embodied traditional values. He was a married, religious family man from the middle-class with a spotless political career and social engagement, he reached out to the opposition party to move forward on bipartisan issues... but conservatives hated him because he was a Democrat and he was black.
Now the US has a "conservative" president who was divorced two times, he did not serve in the military or a political career, has had various affairs with porn stars and models, grew up as an entitled rich-kid, frequently disrespects women with sexually charged commentary and is so self-centered that he spends most of his days checking what people are saying about him on the news... but conservatives love him because.... I don't know. He's as morally depraved as they are?
There was time of real Republican conservatism as embodied by the likes of senator John McCain. This conservatism cared about the middle-class and lower incomes, about traditional family values and also about international alliances, fairness towards partners, the rule of law, honoring treaties and also listening to facts and reason.
That Republican party is no more. It has been hijacked by the right-wing populists who push agendas and fake news (all the while accusing their opponents of doing exactly that in attempt to muddle the minds by pulling everyone else to their low standards). It has solemnly sacrificed logic, reason and the traditional values for some kind of modern, right-wing dadaism that rejects all social norms and values.
The current president and his favorite news channel (Fox) embodies this state that conservatism has morphed into, perfectly.
What I don't understand is, why nobody in conservative America is standing up to all of this bullshit. John McCain was, and now he's dead.
That's actually the traditional meaning of conservative. They represented the old guard, the landed elite, lords and barons, the old money. Progressives used to represent the middle class and new money, industrialists, innovators and the average skilled worker. The period of conservatism in the cold war was the anomaly, unfortunately during that period, the last remnants of progressive politics died.
Now conservatism has returned to it's roots, the elites are back in charge and the hoi polloi are falling in line like they're meant to. It doesn't matter how idiotic or depraved Trump is, he's one of them, the ruling elite and that's all that matters.
According to Top Gear, going around corners is a problem with US car design as they are only able to go blisteringly fast in a straight line :)
There actually is a lot of truth to that. Compared to European cars in the Clarkson/Hammond/May era, many US cars had worse handling than a river barge. Up until this generation, the Ford Mustang had a live rear axle which really limited it's turning ability, it understeered more than my FWD Honda Integra, right up until the moment it oversteered (and not in a good way like my Nissan 200sx). At least when GM re-launched the Camaro, instead of bolting bits of Detroit together, they went to GM Holden Australia who knew about this thing called "multi-link suspension", even then the whole thing was based on a boat called the Holden Commordore.
I'm not sure if the current gen Mustang is any better as I haven't driven one but European cars are lighter and usually handle much better (weight is the enemy of good driving dynamics).
Okay, here is the definition:
Where in the name of Zombie Feinman's ghost did you get that definition.
Wikipedia describes it as:
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that are claimed to be both scientific and factual, but are incompatible with the scientific method.
The OED defines it as:
"1. As a count noun: a spurious or pretended science; a branch of knowledge or a system of beliefs mistakenly regarded as based on scientific method or having the status of scientific truth."
"2. As a mass noun: spurious or pretended science; study or research that is claimed as scientific but is not generally accepted as such. Chiefly derogatory."
Pseudoscience is the technical name for quackery, colloquially it is used to mock things that pretend to be scientific but actually have no basis in science.
Who modded that tripe up and have you taken your watered down snake oil today?
they're not realizing otherwise. They're getting scared of losing what little they have and turning conservative. Meanwhile the mega-corporations run their candidates on conservative rhetoric (all the while pushing radical policies like starting wars with nations that didn't attack us, forcing arbitration on us all and giving themselves massive subsidies while fighting against anything that would increase wages).
But even that's not really a problem. Polls show Americans support single payer healthcare. They support the "New New Deal" and ending the 8 wars we're fighting (again, against nations that have never once attacked us). But _voters_ OTOH... they're not so sure.
The point of mandatory voting isn't get get young folks to vote. It's to end voter suppression. I waited 3 hours in line to vote for Bernie in my primary. That was not an accident. In my state there were police stationed in riot gear outside polls in poor (and especially black) neighborhoods. And now we've got this Voter Id crap whree they just make it so you can't get an Id if you're not somebody who's "supposed" to vote.
Make voting mandatory and that goes away.
What makes you think mandatory voting will fix anything? The laziest part of the great masses of the people are just going to do the minimum required of them. They'll go in and tick a box, at most they will vote for whomever their favourite media personality tells them to.
Australia has mandatory voting, we've got all the same problems with regards to advertising, policies based on vote winning than doing anything for the good of Australia. You end up with parties being elected because they ran a good scare campaign just like in the US. America however has two major issues that aren't in Australia or the UK (where voting isn't mandatory).
1. The electoral collage. Voting is meaningless when someone without a name or accountability can add weighting to it and change the result.
2. Lack of 3rd parties. The only thing keeping Australian or British govts honest are the fact that they often end up depending on 3rd parties, preventing them from ruling by fiat until the next election.
" But something has to be done to counterbalance old folks with dementia being manipulated into voting for things they don't actually want because they can't understand. "
No worries man, we got you covered. We have armies of unjaded, fresh, young voters who vote ( if you can pull them away from their phones long enough ) not based on any educated ideology, but rather who is popular or who promises them the world when election time rolls around.
They're still full of hope. They believe their vote actually means something in the grand scheme of things and their candidate is the political equal to the second coming of $deity.
It takes a few election cycles for them to realize otherwise but hey, by that time we'll have a fresh batch of new voters to prey upon. . .
The lesson here is: Age is irrelevant when you're outnumbered by the inexperienced or gullible.
Welcome to Democracy or, at least it's what we are supposed to believe.
You do know that young voters are the least represented age group. Old voters are pandered to as they're more likely to vote, middle aged are the most buttered up in terms of concessions and welfare as that's essentially two votes for one perk. Young voters can be ignored until they're in their 30's and have pushed out a kid and want that sweet, sweet child benefit perk.
So this is a quibble over the definition of "fit" and whether it means physically fit or more generally fit? Fine. We'll call it survival-of-the-most-able-to-reach-reproducing-age-in-good-health-and-pass-on-genes. Or SOTMATRRAIGHAPOG, for those who like acronyms. That rolls off the tongue much better.
Maybe they meant the Honda Fit. That would make just as much sense as what Darwin actually said was: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change" which some how morphed into "survival of the fittest" which used fit in the context of "Well adapted or suited to the conditions or circumstances" [copy/paste from the OED]
It's not "instead of fittest". Sluggishness might be the best adaptation to an environment, so it could literally be what is meant by "survival of the fittest" in that environment. "Fittest" does not mean the most jacked.
Darwin never actually said "fittest" either. What he said was "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change". This doesn't seem to contradict that at all. A species that can conserve its energy will be more adaptable when changes occur.
But he's far less of an evil than Holocaust deniers and actual Nazis.
Actual Nazis, yes. Holocaust deniers, no. Actual Nazis were dangerous not because of their words, but their actions. It was the fact that they murdered millions of innocent people that made them evil and dangerous, not their speech. Holocaust deniers are not nearly as dangerous as those that would attempt to control the teaching of history through legislation.
Erm... You do know that controlling the teaching of history (as well as many other things) through legislation is EXACTLY what fascist regiemes do right?
They literally had bonfires where banned material was burned, people were encouraged to join in and those that didn't were watched, added to lists, arrested when their nationalism was bought into question.
Fascists believe in both direct action and palingenesis. Direct action is enforcement of political ideology through violence, we've seen plenty of this from the Alt-Right, palingenesis is rebirth, however specifically in this context it's the redefinition of language to mean something else. Alt-Right itself is one such re-definition. It was created by far right bigots to provide a friendlier name than racist or xenophobic whilst still being able to preach racism and xenophobia.
Words are most definitely harmful. Remember that the Nazis didn't just rise up out of nowhere, Hitler had been their spokesperson for years, making impassioned but inflammatory speeches in Munich beer halls for years before they had enough members to start beating up Bolsheviks openly (yep, before the Jews were even targeted, they wiped out Bolshevism in Germany... Nazis are the opposite to communists). Its the same with Mussolini, his speeches caused the march to Rome. Of course Mussolini never expected it to work so he ran off to Milan whilst that went on.
The rise of Fascism is going to do far more harm than any of our enemies could hope to if it isn't nipped in the bud.
Funny how hate-tinged your free speech advocacy is.
Thats the way it always is.
One of the defining points of a fascist is how they redefine the language to mean what they want it to mean. Hence Orwell's concept of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four which was his diatribe against Fascism (Animal Farm was his diatribe against Communism). People like the GP don't want free speech, that wold mean they'd have to tolerate to opposing points of view from so-called "SJWs". Instead they want to be able to say what they like and have everyone else silently agree with it.
I would rather not. There have been conspiracy groups forever. JFK assasinations, moon landings, UFOs, con-trails, you name it. It was _never_ a real threat until they started banning it. By banning it they have given more credibility to this guy than anything they could have ever done by just letting him get on his soap box weekly.
Except reality doesn't work that way. Being banned from a restaurant does not make you more powerful. It means you'll have to go to a different restaurant.
If you get banned from every restaurant in town, you need to admit that you have a problem.
Facebook, et al. are losing more users by not banning Infowars than by banning them.
Where we do studies to learn things that became obvious thru pizza deliver in the 1970s!
But this has an APP and is DISRUPTIVE... Can you not see the difference?