US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2613

On December 06 2015 05:08 Kickstart wrote:

No, but their opinions on complicated matters generally aren't very useful. When they are uneducated and ignorant about it that is.

On December 06 2015 06:55 OtherWorld wrote:

You realize that people holding opinions different than yours probably think that your opinion is uneducated and ignorant, right?...

On December 06 2015 06:56 Kickstart wrote:

Yes. But such is life. Or are you going to argue that people can't have opinions that are objectively wrong or dumb?

On December 06 2015 07:08 OtherWorld wrote:

I personnally consider that every opinion held is dumb. But that's not the point.
If you think that people holding opinions opposite to yours are holding uneducated and ignorant opinions, and these people think the same of your opinions, how do you determine which opinion is actually uneducated and ignorant?

On December 06 2015 07:08 OtherWorld wrote:

I personnally consider that every opinion held is dumb. But that's not the point.
If you think that people holding opinions opposite to yours are holding uneducated and ignorant opinions, and these people think the same of your opinions, how do you determine which opinion is actually uneducated and ignorant?

The memos, stamped “confidential” and kept under wraps for years, portray a White House eager to assert U.S. leadership on climate change. Global warming will have “profound consequences,” one document warns, and the United States “cannot wait” until all scientific questions are resolved before taking action.

The source of the memos: Not the Obama White House, but policy advisers to President George H.W. Bush.

The memos were among several formerly classified documents from the Bush and Reagan administrations obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and released on Wednesday by the National Security Archive. The documents portray senior officials in the two Republican administrations pressing for an aggressive response to international environmental issues of the day — including, during Bush’s term, climate change.

The assertive posture contrasts with the positions taken this week by leading Republican presidential contenders, several of whom publicly mocked Obama’s efforts to secure an international climate treaty in Paris. The GOP-controlled House voted Tuesday to block the administration’s signature regulation to cut greenhouse-gas pollution from U.S. power plants.

The 11 memos released on Wednesday provide snapshots of internal White House deliberations on key environmental issues during the 1980s. Some shed light on the debate over the 1989 Montreal Protocol, which phased out production of industrial chemicals linked to the destruction of the Earth’s ozone layer.

A 1987 memo showed Reagan White House officials pushing back against members of Reagan’s own Cabinet in arguing for a strong treaty safeguarding the thin band of atmospheric ozone that protects the Earth from harmful radiation from space. “Many regard this issue as the most important priority on the global environmental agenda,” John D. Negroponte, then a State Department assistant secretary for the environment, oceans and fisheries, wrote to then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

On December 06 2015 08:16 Kickstart wrote:
So you are going to argue that people who are uncomfortable about trans people aren't ignorant/uneducated on the matter? Because that is the only 'drawer' I put anyone in. And in general I meant people who are afraid of them, but perhaps I didn't articulate myself well enough.

On December 06 2015 11:51 killa_robot wrote:


Feel free to enlighten all those ignorant fools. I'm dying to see just how uneducated I am on the subject compared to the guy who just a few posts ago was confusing sex with gender, lol.

On December 06 2015 11:33 Mohdoo wrote:
Lol I'd love to see someone at the Republican debate be asked "were Reagan and Bush wrong about climate change?"

Erika Christakis, the faculty member at the center of a racially charged debate at Yale, has decided not to teach at the Ivy League school going forward.

"I will not be teaching at Yale in the future," she told Business Insider in an email Thursday.

Christakis' decision came after weeks of backlash against the lecturer and administrator over an email she sent to students suggesting that Yale shouldn't tell them not to wear offensive Halloween costumes.

When I was young, adults were freaked out by the specter of Halloween candy poisoned by lunatics, or spiked with razor blades (despite the absence of a single recorded case of such an event). Now, we’ve grown to fear the sugary candy itself. And this year, we seem afraid that college students are unable to decide how to dress themselves on Halloween.

I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community. I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.

It seems to me that we can have this discussion of costumes on many levels: we can talk about complex issues of identify, free speech, cultural appropriation, and virtue “signaling.” But I wanted to share my thoughts with you from a totally different angle, as an educator concerned with the developmental stages of childhood and young adulthood.

As a former preschool teacher, for example, it is hard for me to give credence to a claim that there is something objectionably “appropriative” about a blonde-haired child’s wanting to be Mulan for a day. Pretend play is the foundation of most cognitive tasks, and it seems to me that we want to be in the business of encouraging the exercise of imagination, not constraining it. I suppose we could agree that there is a difference between fantasizing about an individual character vs. appropriating a culture, wholesale, the latter of which could be seen as (tacky)(offensive)(jejeune)(hurtful), take your pick. But, then, I wonder what is the statute of limitations on dreaming of dressing as Tiana the Frog Princess if you aren’t a black girl from New Orleans? Is it okay if you are eight, but not 18? I don’t know the answer to these questions; they seem unanswerable. Or at the least, they put us on slippery terrain that I, for one, prefer not to cross.

Which is my point. I don’t, actually, trust myself to foist my Halloweenish standards and motives on others. I can’t defend them anymore than you could defend yours. Why do we dress up on Halloween, anyway? Should we start explaining that too? I’ve always been a good mimic and I enjoy accents. I love to travel, too, and have been to every continent but Antarctica. When I lived in Bangladesh, I bought a sari because it was beautiful, even though I looked stupid in it and never wore it once. Am I fetishizing and appropriating others’ cultural experiences? Probably. But I really, really like them too.

On December 06 2015 16:16 Eskendereya wrote:
"The most accurate pundits in the history of American presidential politics reside far from the Beltway, on a 403-square mile patch of land along the western border of Indiana."

"And, in nearly every presidential election since 1888, voters here in this blue-collar county have selected the winning candidate, missing only twice: Once, in 1908, when they opted for Williams Jennings Bryan instead of William Howard Taft, and again in 1952, when they chose Adlai Stevenson rather than Dwight D. Eisenhower."

The most reliable county in the USA, a Democrat dominated blue-collar county called "Vigo County", is overwhelmingly enthusiastically supporting Trump for president. Since 1888, they've selected the winning presidential candidate every time except twice. Huge omen for Trump!

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/2016-indiana-county-predicts-every-election-trump-fever-213411#ixzz3tWRVilgF

Trump and Hillary are practically in a dead heat, Trump has slowly gained on Hillary since he started and is now in a virtual tie: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton-5491.html

On December 06 2015 17:48 RenSC2 wrote:

A couple things strike me as strange right off the bat.
1) "A Democrat dominated blue-collar county". How can they call it democrat dominated if they voted for George W Bush twice? They voted for George HW Bush once. They voted for Reagan twice. That's more picks for Republicans than democrats since 1980. This does not sound like "democrat dominated". Instead, it points to a politically motivated article to make people believe that even democrats support Trump and that supporting him is to support the future president (not throwing away money by backing him). His high negative opinion numbers make a different case.

2) They have not cast a single vote for Trump yet. Their current support of Trump is meaningless unless we can also confirm that they favored the eventual winning candidates months before the primaries began. They can love Trump, but still end up voting Clinton over Carson/Rubio/Cruz and extend their streak.

Finally, getting 30 out of 32 right is impressive, but not nearly as much as it may seem. It's not like correctly guessing a coin flip 30 of 32 times. The choices have essentially been limited to two candidates each election and in many cases, there's a pretty clear favorite. If you're in a generally neutral county, then it stands to reason that your county would be able to pick the correct winner quite often. The only real impressive thing is that Vigo county has remained relatively politically neutral for all those years.

However, politicizing their county could easy have a negative effect on their predictive powers because they would no longer be a generally neutral county that was swayed by the more popular candidate.