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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On August 15 2013 11:12 aksfjh wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 10:41 sunprince wrote:On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:On August 15 2013 08:54 sunprince wrote:On August 15 2013 07:53 kwizach wrote:On August 15 2013 02:26 sunprince wrote:On August 14 2013 23:21 Stratos_speAr wrote:On August 14 2013 13:46 sunprince wrote:On August 14 2013 09:13 kwizach wrote:On August 14 2013 08:43 sunprince wrote:
[quote]
Contrary to gun control advocates telling us that "gun control lowers violent crime" and gun rights proponents telling us that "gun rights deter violent crime", the consensus in the field of criminology (as reflected by undergraduate level textbooks and literature reviews in peer-reviewed scholarly journals) is that gun control has no proven significant effect (positive or negative) on crime. There's a difference between not having definitely proved causation (which is often a hard task in social sciences) and causation not existing. Plenty of studies have shown a correlation between stricter gun control laws and smaller numbers of gun-related deaths. Your argument here misses the point. Obviously, lower gun availability will reduce gun-related deaths, just like fewer cars will reduce automobile related deaths. The question, however, is whether reducing gun availability would reduce violent crime. Criminological consensus (which focuses on the issue of violent crime, rather than mere gun deaths) concludes that there is insufficient evidence to even justify any sort of cautionary policy change, let alone conclusively prove a causation. The problem America has, when compared to other first-world nations, is not with gun violence. It is with violent crime in general. Even if you removed all instances of gun violence (which is charitable considering that in many cases the violence would simply be carried out through different means), America is still a bizarre outlier in terms of violent crime. The reasons for this are complex, but range from high levels of social stratification, to racial tensions, to the poor public education system, to the War on Drugs, to high rates of teen pregnancy, to the increasing prevalence of single parent households, and so forth. It's a tangled web for which both Democrats and Republicans have much to answer for. It's also not a simple problem that can be fixed (or even helped) by something as narrow as reducing gun availability. There is no true "consensus" on this topic. You're trying to make this sound like it's just as proven as climate change is, which is complete B.S. There is a consensus within the criminological field that gun control has no established significant effect on rates of violent crime. Non-experts (including experts from other fields) might argue left and right while missing the facts or focusing on off-topic red herrings, but criminology settled this a while ago and continuously publishes studies to reinforce this (which, like studies proving climate change or evolution, are ignored by the skewed political debate). Did you somehow miss my post? Studies on the topic show a significant correlation between firearm availability and number of homicides, as shown in the literature review I posted. In fact, your own study, which only summarily touches on international comparisons on the matter, recognizes that the existing literature can be considered suggestive (although it does not consider it conclusive). Such a correlation doesn't show causation, which is crucial here: National Academy of Sciences wrote:
Case-control studies show that violence is positively associated with firearms ownership, but they have not determined whether these associations reflect causal mechanisms. Two main problems hinder inference on these questions. First and foremost, these studies fail to address the primary inferential problems that arise because ownership is not a random decision. For example, suicidal persons may, in the absence of a firearm, use other means of committing suicide. Homicide victims may possess firearms precisely because they are likely to be victimized. Second, reporting errors regarding firearms ownership may systemically bias the results of estimated associations between ownership and violence.
Ecological studies currently provide contradictory evidence on violence and firearms ownership. For example, in the United States, suicide appears to be positively associated with rates of firearms ownership, but homicide is not. In contrast, in comparisons among countries, the association between rates of suicide and gun ownership is nonexistent or very weak but there is a substantial association between gun ownership and homicide. These cross-country comparisons reflect the fact that the suicide rate in the United States ranks toward the middle of industrialized countries, whereas the U.S. homicide rate is much higher than in all other developed countries.
The committee cannot determine whether these associations demonstrate causal relationships. There are three key problems. First, as noted above, these studies do not adequately address the problem of self-selection. Second, these studies must rely on proxy measures of ownership that are certain to create biases of unknown magnitude and direction. Third, because the ecological correlations are at a higher geographic level of aggregation, there is no way of knowing whether the homicides or suicides occurred in the same areas in which the firearms are owned.
In summary, the committee concludes that existing research studies and data include a wealth of descriptive information on homicide, suicide, and firearms, but, because of the limitations of existing data and methods, do not credibly demonstrate a causal relationship between the ownership of firearms and the causes or prevention of criminal violence or suicide. Emphasis mine. Your are quoting a 2004 review (well published in book form but seemingly peer reviewed) that comes to the conclusion that current data is not enough to justify claiming a causative relation between gun control and crime. It admits that correlations exist but that more and better data needs to be gathered before claims of causation are made. Kwizatch also quotes a 2004 review which claims correlations between gun control and crime rate. "Seemingly peer reviewed"? My source is the National Academy of Sciences, which is quite a bit more legitimate than "seemingly peer reviewed". On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
Your first post claimed that "liberals ignore reality when it suits them" Citing ignoring criminology literature on the subject of gun control as an example. But as noted even in the review you yourself quoted there are correlations. Liberal politicians letting that correlation inform their position on gun control do the opposite of willfully ignoring the literature even if the authors of one particular review come to the conclusion there is currently (meaning 9 years ago) not enough data to support causation. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. In the absence of any evidence for a causative link, it is absolutely wrong to act upon correlations. Without evidence of causation, correlation is meaningless except perhaps as an indicator that more research is needed. On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
You could argue that they should claim no position at all until more research has been done and more data gathered and I would disagree. In any case I would say that you had no basis for your original claim (namely that they deliberately ignore the literature.) Liberals typically claim that the availability of firearms causes violent crime and the reducing firearm availability via gun control will reduce violent crime. This is deliberately ignoring the literature, since there is no evidence for these claims. On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
You also claim that there is a strong consensus among economists that minimum wage lowers employment. Some time on google scholar seems to confirm that this was the case up until the mid 90s. After that more and more studies emerge claiming an insignificant relationship between minimum wage and employment level. The debate seems to be ongoing. Again it seems to me that the fact that there is an ongoing debate leaves no justification for your original claim that liberals willfully ignore an established scientific consensus on the topic. Liberals have supported the minimum wage long before the mid 90s. On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
I am out of time or energy to go through the remaining claims in that post but my guess is that they are just as contentious as the ones above. In other words, you don't actually have a legitimate argument. First off, stop quoting stuff like that. It's really hard to follow and bloats your posts like none other.
It allows me to address individual issues in a manner that makes it clear which parts of an argument I am responding to.
On August 15 2013 11:12 aksfjh wrote:
You seem confused about science and policy. Science doesn't really "act" on anything, except maybe to divert more studies to the subject.
My point, which should be obvious to anyone not nitpicking, is that the push to enact gun control is unsupported by science.
On August 15 2013 11:12 aksfjh wrote:
Now, scientifically, it would be wrong to draw a conclusion of causal linkage. However, in the wider scope of policy, there are decisions that need to be made (based on the scientific findings we have and the severity of the problem). For guns (and gun violence), the science has determined a "positive association" between violence and firearm ownership. While not a causal link, it is a link that is worth exploring, both for research and policy options.
I agree; we should research the topic more. However, if you actually read the discussion, my argument in this discussion is simply that liberals also disregard science when it suits them (even though this is less often than conservatives do), in pointing out that they make claims about gun control that are unsupported by scientific evidence.
On August 15 2013 11:12 aksfjh wrote:
Sadly, both avenues have been blocked by gun advocates. No science can really be done to further pursue an explanation for this link, and without the science, the policy has a harder time being justified.
I agree. This is an area in which I am highly critical of the NRA, even though I support the right to firearm ownership in general.
On August 15 2013 11:12 aksfjh wrote:
As for the literature on minimum wage, all of it either says there is no effect, or that there is very little negative effect (on employment). There's some stuff that just came out recently that hints that increasing minimum wage may have slight negative medium-term effects, but I don't think it's been followed up on yet.
My understanding of the literature suggests that the effect is indeed relatively low. However, my point is only that liberals make claims unsupported by the literature on the topic of minimum wage, just as conservatives make unsupported claims on other issues.
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On August 15 2013 10:27 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:Every single on of the ACLU's official positions reflect liberal ideology. This includes hypocritical positions in which the ACLU sides against civil liberties, such as in the case of gun ownership (a personal freedom that ended up inverted in which side supports it in American politics due to political expediency), as well as cases such as the due process issue with university judicial policy I talked about in the previous post. The ACLU does not take a position on gun control. Yes, they do; you just failed to understand your own source. The ACLU's position is that the Second Amendment protects a collective right to own guns, rather than an individual right. In other words, they disagree that individual citizens have a right to own firearms. Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:
Honestly, I always find this position baffling. Free Speech is liberal? Right to Privacy is liberal? Due Process is liberal? This sounds like something a hardcore liberal like me would say. You're basically saying that the opposite of the ACLU are a bunch of authoritarian freaks. That's not the argument I'm making, and you know it. The point I'm making is that wherever there is a debate between liberals and conservatives on an issue, the ACLU agrees with the liberal position. Neither liberals nor conservatives oppose free speech, right to privacy, or due process in general, but the devil is in the details and the ACLU takes the liberal side whenever there's a divide. Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:Yet another red herring, but I'll address this too. My claim was that women, as a class, have not been historically oppressed. Additionally, I didn't dismiss your argument on gays, I fully addressed and debunked it. Except those same arguments you used for gays works precisely with women. Oppression of women has also been established. The Abrahamic Religion stuff applies just as much with women. You're addressing of the issue was simply "Nah, homosexuals were totally oppressed and it's not like women at all for some reason." Whoooosh! Right over your head. That's not what I said and you know it. I clearly addressed the point about gays here. I gave you an example of unjust treatment suffered by gays, which demonstrates why they were oppressed. I also pointed out the quality of life metric issue: women have higher quality of life by virtually all empirical metrics compared to men, which calls the notion of "oppression" into question. Regardless, you're missing the whole "burden of proof" issue in the larger discussion: you don't get to declare that women were oppressed without evidence. If you want to make that claim, then advance evidence to support it. I'm merely being charitable by giving you my counterevidence early. Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:
And saying that "women didn't rise up therefore they weren't oppressed" is a blatant example of Just-World Hypothesis. For example. But in the course of that thread (and pretty much any other topic on feminism), you are prone to the assumption that women are responsible for their own misfortune. Just-World Hypothesis. And the funny part is when you say that anything else is just misogyny. Another strawman. My argument is that women not only didn't rise up, but they were happy to support the status quo. In other words, my argument is that women were content, not oppressed. Their behavior is simply evidence that they were content. The real misogyny here is in your sexist assumption that women were so weak and pathetic that they allowed themselves to be oppressed without doing anything about it, unlike every other oppressed group in the history of the world. Does it make you feel like a big strong man every time you declare that women are too weak to defend themselves? Disgusting. Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:Criticizing feminism does not make one an MRA, just as criticizing sexism does not make one a feminist. MRAs do not have a monopoly on criticizing feminism, and I've indicated before that I while I agree with some MRA arguments, I generally consider them whiners.
Since you are familiar with me, you may have noticed that my nuanced positions often mean that I both agree with and disagree with most popular ideological camps. I similarly defend abortion rights or gun rights whenever the topic comes up, but that makes me neither a feminist nor an NRA gun nut.
To be fair, I said you had an MRA-like stance. And quite frankly, even though I meant it as an insult, I'm surprised you took it as an insult. I don't take it as an insult. I'm just pointing out that it's untrue, just as it would be untrue to label me a liberal, a conservative, a feminist, or a gun nut, on the basis of a skewed sample of my less popular opinions. Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:Point out my logical fallacies and errors, instead of merely claiming that I make them. Show, don't tell.
TL;DR: Address my actual arguments instead of resorting to personal attacks, shaming tactics, and logical fallacies. Spend more time researching the topics being discussed, instead of searching through my post history to find mud to fling. You're not fooling me or anyone else here with your failure to engage in reasoned debate, except maybe yourself and your fellow liberal partisan ideologues who already agree with you. I notice that you're asking opposite things of me here. Either I have to go further into your history to point out logical fallacies, or engage with the current debate (which is the ACLU defending the sexual assault stuff). What I meant was, you should be sticking with the current debate, and calling out logical fallacies as they crop up. That's more or less what reasoned debate is: discussing the issue at hand, rather than dragging up unrelated discussions to try to engage in personal attacks. Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:
My point here is to explain why it's not worth to engage you in reasoned debate, because you are actually not a reasonable person. I suppose I could try again with the ACLU sexual assault stuff. Would you like that?
My other major point here is to entertain all the lovely folks out there. Hence the popcorn. If you don't consider me a reasonable person, then feel free to ignore my posts. If you're indeed replying to me purely for the purpose of personal attacks and trolling, as you claim, then that would be not just against TL rules, but the specific rules for this thread, would it not?
Ok DO NOT bring your bullshit pseudo-intellectual drivel about women's oppression or lack thereof into this thread. It is not the place for it. You were thoroughly tongue-lashed in the last thread for being so intellectually dishonest and having absolutely no clue what the definition of "oppressed" truly is. We do not need that crap in this thread. We already have more than enough stuff to argue about. Stick to your argument over the ACLU.
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I thought this was pretty cool. I hope The Administration does more of this and less derping around over airline mergers.
Brazilians Flood To U.S. On Massive Shopping Sprees
A few years ago, the demand for visas overwhelmed the U.S. Consulate in Sao Paulo. Brazil was booming and people wanted to travel. Dennis Hankins, the U.S. consul general there, says it was a crisis.
"Two years ago, Brazilians had to wait five months just to get an interview," he recalls.
The backlog was enormous. The Brazilian government complained. President Obama got involved, ordering that visa processing be accelerated.
Then what the staff in Sao Paulo calls "the surge" happened.
They doubled the numbers of consular staff, expanded the facilities and streamlined operations. Now, people wait two days to get an interview, and each interview lasts only a few minutes. People are in and out in about an hour. Last year, more than a million Brazilians got visas.
Last year, 1.8 million Brazilians visited the U.S., Hankins says, ranking the country No. 6 on the list of highest number of tourists. That number is expected to rise to 2 million in 2013.
And Brazilians spent over $9 billion in the U.S., Hankins says, making them the fifth-largest spenders among foreign tourists in the U.S. And that means big revenues for U.S. companies.
Link
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They clearly state that they disagree with the Supreme Court's conclusion that the Second Amendment protects the right to firearm ownership. That's not a neutral position!
Yes it is. If you do not consider that a neutral position, then please describe a neutral position.
My argument is that the ACLU is selective in which civil liberties they protect and how they choose to interpret various issues of civil liberty, demonstrating their adherence to partisan liberal ideology rather than general principles of civil liberty.
I see no way to not do that. It is impossible to have an ideal on such civil liberties, because people's civil liberties will intersect with each other. You have to have an interpretation in some way. You're acting like there's some other option.
Why do you consider gun ownership to be an individual right?
By details, I mean that no one is opposed to free speech in general, but people come down against free speech in favor of other things with respect to specific issues, for example, national security or hostile work environments.
The latter is an example of what I mean by hypocrisy on the issue: in Aguilar v. Avis Rent-A-Car System (1999), the ACLU field an amicus brief in which it argued that any speech which contributes to a “hostile work environment” automatically ceases to be speech and simply becomes an unprotected “verbal act.” The TL;DR of the case is that the trial court banned a private-sector employee (with a Hispanic wife) from using racial epithets regarding Hispanics, even if there were no Hispanic people around. The ACLU supported this ban on the basis that such a racial epithet might create a hostile work environment, even if no Hispanics were around to hear it.
One would think that the ACLU, being an absolutely staunch defender of free speech, would never support a ban on such speech, even if it included potentially racist remarks. However, they not only didn't support free speech in this case, they came down against it. This put them squarely in line with liberal ideology on racial issues, rather than absolutely defending free speech as you might expect.
That's a good example. Do you think a conservative would disagree on that then? What would be the conservative viewpoint?
Obviously the ACLU supports hate speech in a non-work environment, so it seems like in this case they saw in conflict with the 14th Amendment, and their usual adage of "the solution to free speech is more speech" did not apply in this environment.
As you might expect, I see this as a pragmatic understanding of free speech, rather than hypocrisy.
Edit: Let me put the women oppression stuff in spoiler. I think if we want to continue that we should bring that to PM.
+ Show Spoiler +I've already explained this over and over and you keep ignoring it: my point is that women weren't oppressed in the first place, not that they deserve oppression. My argument is that they were content. Do you not recognize that there were laws against women owning property and all sorts of various things? There was all the Coverture Laws, which began to be dismantled pretty much since the birth of America. Because once you establish those things, and all the various sexual issues (like biblical stoning of non-virgin brides and similar sexual rules), then you get injustice and all that good stuff. And claiming that women would "rise up" has to do more with the fact that women can't be segregated like class or race struggles. It's just as preposterous as saying that homosexuals would "rise up." Rise up against who, exactly? Men? Their own family and friends? You're acting silly. Women, like homosexuals, have to work within the system for change, and that is a system that has been stacked against them from the beginning. Violent upheavals are generally pretty bad for women. And I'm obviously not going to talk about patriarchy with you, because you have some weird strawman version of it in your head. Besides, you don't need 'patriarchy' to talk about the historical systematic oppression of women. You can still think patriarchy is bullshit while admitting that women have been historically oppressed. But really, if you didn't have Motivated Skepticism, you would have absolutely no problem saying that women were historically oppressed, in much the same way homosexuals were. But right now, you're trying very hard to describe why the two things are absolutely totally different, rather than look at their similarities and why you might be mistaken. You do not want to be wrong about this, regardless of the reality. I mean come on. If I used the fact there weren't homosexual uprisings as evidence that they were perfectly content in the closet, you would think I'm an asshole. Edit: actually if I made this analogous I would have to go further. I should call you homophobic for suggesting that homosexuals were too weak and defenseless to ever stand up for themselves, unlike other groups in history.
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There’s been lot of chatter today about these rather blunt remarks from Newt Gingrich about the perils of the GOP’s obsession with destroying Obamacare while refusing to offer any meaningful alternative:
“I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, ‘What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?’ They will have zero answer,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich blamed the problem on Republican culture that rewards obstruction and negativity instead of innovation and “being positive.”
“We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything,” Gingrich said,
acknowledging the “totally candid” nature of his remarks. “We have to do the homework.”
“This is a very deep problem,” said Gingrich.
I don’t think this is an accident or an off the cuff remark. It looks to me like there are enough data points out there to suggest that Republicans now recognize that their overall posture on Obamacare — not to mention on the president himself — is deeply problematic, and are seriously grappling with it at the highest levels of the party.
Source
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On August 15 2013 10:41 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:On August 15 2013 08:54 sunprince wrote:On August 15 2013 07:53 kwizach wrote:On August 15 2013 02:26 sunprince wrote:On August 14 2013 23:21 Stratos_speAr wrote:On August 14 2013 13:46 sunprince wrote:On August 14 2013 09:13 kwizach wrote:On August 14 2013 08:43 sunprince wrote:On August 14 2013 08:17 kwizach wrote:
[quote]
A number of these examples are sketchy at best - for example, what "criminological literature on gun control"? Contrary to gun control advocates telling us that "gun control lowers violent crime" and gun rights proponents telling us that "gun rights deter violent crime", the consensus in the field of criminology (as reflected by undergraduate level textbooks and literature reviews in peer-reviewed scholarly journals) is that gun control has no proven significant effect (positive or negative) on crime. There's a difference between not having definitely proved causation (which is often a hard task in social sciences) and causation not existing. Plenty of studies have shown a correlation between stricter gun control laws and smaller numbers of gun-related deaths. Your argument here misses the point. Obviously, lower gun availability will reduce gun-related deaths, just like fewer cars will reduce automobile related deaths. The question, however, is whether reducing gun availability would reduce violent crime. Criminological consensus (which focuses on the issue of violent crime, rather than mere gun deaths) concludes that there is insufficient evidence to even justify any sort of cautionary policy change, let alone conclusively prove a causation. The problem America has, when compared to other first-world nations, is not with gun violence. It is with violent crime in general. Even if you removed all instances of gun violence (which is charitable considering that in many cases the violence would simply be carried out through different means), America is still a bizarre outlier in terms of violent crime. The reasons for this are complex, but range from high levels of social stratification, to racial tensions, to the poor public education system, to the War on Drugs, to high rates of teen pregnancy, to the increasing prevalence of single parent households, and so forth. It's a tangled web for which both Democrats and Republicans have much to answer for. It's also not a simple problem that can be fixed (or even helped) by something as narrow as reducing gun availability. There is no true "consensus" on this topic. You're trying to make this sound like it's just as proven as climate change is, which is complete B.S. There is a consensus within the criminological field that gun control has no established significant effect on rates of violent crime. Non-experts (including experts from other fields) might argue left and right while missing the facts or focusing on off-topic red herrings, but criminology settled this a while ago and continuously publishes studies to reinforce this (which, like studies proving climate change or evolution, are ignored by the skewed political debate). Did you somehow miss my post? Studies on the topic show a significant correlation between firearm availability and number of homicides, as shown in the literature review I posted. In fact, your own study, which only summarily touches on international comparisons on the matter, recognizes that the existing literature can be considered suggestive (although it does not consider it conclusive). Such a correlation doesn't show causation, which is crucial here: National Academy of Sciences wrote:
Case-control studies show that violence is positively associated with firearms ownership, but they have not determined whether these associations reflect causal mechanisms. Two main problems hinder inference on these questions. First and foremost, these studies fail to address the primary inferential problems that arise because ownership is not a random decision. For example, suicidal persons may, in the absence of a firearm, use other means of committing suicide. Homicide victims may possess firearms precisely because they are likely to be victimized. Second, reporting errors regarding firearms ownership may systemically bias the results of estimated associations between ownership and violence.
Ecological studies currently provide contradictory evidence on violence and firearms ownership. For example, in the United States, suicide appears to be positively associated with rates of firearms ownership, but homicide is not. In contrast, in comparisons among countries, the association between rates of suicide and gun ownership is nonexistent or very weak but there is a substantial association between gun ownership and homicide. These cross-country comparisons reflect the fact that the suicide rate in the United States ranks toward the middle of industrialized countries, whereas the U.S. homicide rate is much higher than in all other developed countries.
The committee cannot determine whether these associations demonstrate causal relationships. There are three key problems. First, as noted above, these studies do not adequately address the problem of self-selection. Second, these studies must rely on proxy measures of ownership that are certain to create biases of unknown magnitude and direction. Third, because the ecological correlations are at a higher geographic level of aggregation, there is no way of knowing whether the homicides or suicides occurred in the same areas in which the firearms are owned.
In summary, the committee concludes that existing research studies and data include a wealth of descriptive information on homicide, suicide, and firearms, but, because of the limitations of existing data and methods, do not credibly demonstrate a causal relationship between the ownership of firearms and the causes or prevention of criminal violence or suicide. Emphasis mine. Your are quoting a 2004 review (well published in book form but seemingly peer reviewed) that comes to the conclusion that current data is not enough to justify claiming a causative relation between gun control and crime. It admits that correlations exist but that more and better data needs to be gathered before claims of causation are made. Kwizatch also quotes a 2004 review which claims correlations between gun control and crime rate. "Seemingly peer reviewed"? My source is the National Academy of Sciences, which is quite a bit more legitimate than "seemingly peer reviewed". Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
Your first post claimed that "liberals ignore reality when it suits them" Citing ignoring criminology literature on the subject of gun control as an example. But as noted even in the review you yourself quoted there are correlations. Liberal politicians letting that correlation inform their position on gun control do the opposite of willfully ignoring the literature even if the authors of one particular review come to the conclusion there is currently (meaning 9 years ago) not enough data to support causation. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. In the absence of any evidence for a causative link, it is absolutely wrong to act upon correlations. Without evidence of causation, correlation is meaningless except perhaps as an indicator that more research is needed. Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
You could argue that they should claim no position at all until more research has been done and more data gathered and I would disagree. In any case I would say that you had no basis for your original claim (namely that they deliberately ignore the literature.) Liberals typically claim that the availability of firearms causes violent crime and the reducing firearm availability via gun control will reduce violent crime. This is deliberately ignoring the literature, since there is no evidence for these claims. Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
You also claim that there is a strong consensus among economists that minimum wage lowers employment. Some time on google scholar seems to confirm that this was the case up until the mid 90s. After that more and more studies emerge claiming an insignificant relationship between minimum wage and employment level. The debate seems to be ongoing. Again it seems to me that the fact that there is an ongoing debate leaves no justification for your original claim that liberals willfully ignore an established scientific consensus on the topic. Liberals have supported the minimum wage long before the mid 90s. Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 09:54 KlaCkoN wrote:
I am out of time or energy to go through the remaining claims in that post but my guess is that they are just as contentious as the ones above. In other words, you don't actually have a legitimate argument.
Oh you are one of those.
From the beginning I guess: I repeat, you have a 2004 review that claims current (at that point) data is not enough to successfully argue causality. Other authors may or may not agree, as far as I know the requirements for causality in the social sciences are even less agreed upon than in the hard ones. Whether the proven correlations should inform policy is a political decision and has nothing to do with science. Legislation has to be made even in the absence of the required data and if your definition of "anti science" includes people that look at a strong correlation with a reasonable explanation and chooses to legislate accordingly while waiting for more data to be gathered then whatever.
Re: the minimum wage thing. You claimed that there was a strong consensus, there turned out to not be one. That's enough for me to not bother reading up on your other claims. If I see them again in a vacuum or made by someone who doesnt demonstrably state falsehoods I will probably be interested enough to look at them, because well they are interesting.
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On August 15 2013 13:57 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +There’s been lot of chatter today about these rather blunt remarks from Newt Gingrich about the perils of the GOP’s obsession with destroying Obamacare while refusing to offer any meaningful alternative:
“I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, ‘What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?’ They will have zero answer,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich blamed the problem on Republican culture that rewards obstruction and negativity instead of innovation and “being positive.”
“We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything,” Gingrich said,
acknowledging the “totally candid” nature of his remarks. “We have to do the homework.”
“This is a very deep problem,” said Gingrich.
I don’t think this is an accident or an off the cuff remark. It looks to me like there are enough data points out there to suggest that Republicans now recognize that their overall posture on Obamacare — not to mention on the president himself — is deeply problematic, and are seriously grappling with it at the highest levels of the party. Source
Well there seeing that problem sooner then i expected them to. Tobad a lot of the damage is already done. Wonder if we will actually see a change by the party as a whole in the months to come.
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On August 15 2013 13:57 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +There’s been lot of chatter today about these rather blunt remarks from Newt Gingrich about the perils of the GOP’s obsession with destroying Obamacare while refusing to offer any meaningful alternative:
“I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, ‘What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?’ They will have zero answer,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich blamed the problem on Republican culture that rewards obstruction and negativity instead of innovation and “being positive.”
“We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything,” Gingrich said,
acknowledging the “totally candid” nature of his remarks. “We have to do the homework.”
“This is a very deep problem,” said Gingrich.
I don’t think this is an accident or an off the cuff remark. It looks to me like there are enough data points out there to suggest that Republicans now recognize that their overall posture on Obamacare — not to mention on the president himself — is deeply problematic, and are seriously grappling with it at the highest levels of the party. Source
Holy shit. When that's coming from Newt Gingrich, you know it's gotten to a bad point.
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On August 15 2013 20:29 BallinWitStalin wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 13:57 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:There’s been lot of chatter today about these rather blunt remarks from Newt Gingrich about the perils of the GOP’s obsession with destroying Obamacare while refusing to offer any meaningful alternative:
“I will bet you, for most of you, you go home in the next two weeks when your members of Congress are home, and you look them in the eye and you say, ‘What is your positive replacement for Obamacare?’ They will have zero answer,” Gingrich said.
Gingrich blamed the problem on Republican culture that rewards obstruction and negativity instead of innovation and “being positive.”
“We are caught up right now in a culture, and you see it every single day, where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything,” Gingrich said,
acknowledging the “totally candid” nature of his remarks. “We have to do the homework.”
“This is a very deep problem,” said Gingrich.
I don’t think this is an accident or an off the cuff remark. It looks to me like there are enough data points out there to suggest that Republicans now recognize that their overall posture on Obamacare — not to mention on the president himself — is deeply problematic, and are seriously grappling with it at the highest levels of the party. Source Holy shit. When that's coming from Newt Gingrich, you know it's gotten to a bad point.
Newt Gingrich has proven to have a negative amount of self-awareness. The guy would yell at you for being too angry.
He really loves to talk about the sanctity of his third marriage.
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Set your irony meters to lethal.
Romney wins food stamp districts
Bloomberg — As the U.S. economy recovers from the worst recession since the Great Depression, the explosive growth of food stamps remains a lingering legacy. And now the program comes with an irony, as the Republicans seeking to cut it also represent vast numbers of recipients.
Among the 254 counties where food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them in last year’s presidential election, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by Bloomberg. Kentucky’s Owsley County, which backed Romney with 81 percent of its vote, has the largest proportion of food stamp recipients among those that he carried.
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On August 15 2013 08:54 sunprince wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 07:53 kwizach wrote:On August 15 2013 02:26 sunprince wrote:On August 14 2013 23:21 Stratos_speAr wrote:On August 14 2013 13:46 sunprince wrote:On August 14 2013 09:13 kwizach wrote:On August 14 2013 08:43 sunprince wrote:On August 14 2013 08:17 kwizach wrote:On August 14 2013 08:06 sunprince wrote:On August 14 2013 07:18 Stratos_speAr wrote:
[quote]
Conservatives do have a disturbing trend of being detached from reality.
"Women's bodies fight off rape babies!"
"Racism/sexism don't exist anymore!"
"Being able to fight three different wars at once is the only way any country can ever be safe!"
"Everyone is able to get a job whenever they want, regardless of their circumstance, and pay to move their way up in the world, get an education, and move up in socioeconomic status! I did it, so obviously everyone can!"
"Kids can just get jobs anywhere to pay off those student loans, and young kids can just get jobs anywhere and save for college while they're in high school!"
I could go on, but you get the point. I would certainly agree that conservatives are more "anti-science". However, liberals also ignore reality when it suits them, ranging from ignoring the criminological literature on gun control, to their obsession with blank slates in spite of biological evidence that nature matters as much as or more than nurture, to pretending that there is a gender wage gap, to ignoring consensus among economists that minimum wage increases unemployment among low-skilled workers. Essentially, every side lies and ignores science in order to support their views, and while I would agree conservatives do it more often, that doesn't excuse liberals either. A number of these examples are sketchy at best - for example, what "criminological literature on gun control"? Contrary to gun control advocates telling us that "gun control lowers violent crime" and gun rights proponents telling us that "gun rights deter violent crime", the consensus in the field of criminology (as reflected by undergraduate level textbooks and literature reviews in peer-reviewed scholarly journals) is that gun control has no proven significant effect (positive or negative) on crime. There's a difference between not having definitely proved causation (which is often a hard task in social sciences) and causation not existing. Plenty of studies have shown a correlation between stricter gun control laws and smaller numbers of gun-related deaths. Your argument here misses the point. Obviously, lower gun availability will reduce gun-related deaths, just like fewer cars will reduce automobile related deaths. The question, however, is whether reducing gun availability would reduce violent crime. Criminological consensus (which focuses on the issue of violent crime, rather than mere gun deaths) concludes that there is insufficient evidence to even justify any sort of cautionary policy change, let alone conclusively prove a causation. The problem America has, when compared to other first-world nations, is not with gun violence. It is with violent crime in general. Even if you removed all instances of gun violence (which is charitable considering that in many cases the violence would simply be carried out through different means), America is still a bizarre outlier in terms of violent crime. The reasons for this are complex, but range from high levels of social stratification, to racial tensions, to the poor public education system, to the War on Drugs, to high rates of teen pregnancy, to the increasing prevalence of single parent households, and so forth. It's a tangled web for which both Democrats and Republicans have much to answer for. It's also not a simple problem that can be fixed (or even helped) by something as narrow as reducing gun availability. There is no true "consensus" on this topic. You're trying to make this sound like it's just as proven as climate change is, which is complete B.S. There is a consensus within the criminological field that gun control has no established significant effect on rates of violent crime. Non-experts (including experts from other fields) might argue left and right while missing the facts or focusing on off-topic red herrings, but criminology settled this a while ago and continuously publishes studies to reinforce this (which, like studies proving climate change or evolution, are ignored by the skewed political debate). Did you somehow miss my post? Studies on the topic show a significant correlation between firearm availability and number of homicides, as shown in the literature review I posted. In fact, your own study, which only summarily touches on international comparisons on the matter, recognizes that the existing literature can be considered suggestive (although it does not consider it conclusive). Such a correlation doesn't show causation, which is crucial here: Show nested quote +National Academy of Sciences wrote:
Case-control studies show that violence is positively associated with firearms ownership, but they have not determined whether these associations reflect causal mechanisms. Two main problems hinder inference on these questions. First and foremost, these studies fail to address the primary inferential problems that arise because ownership is not a random decision. For example, suicidal persons may, in the absence of a firearm, use other means of committing suicide. Homicide victims may possess firearms precisely because they are likely to be victimized. Second, reporting errors regarding firearms ownership may systemically bias the results of estimated associations between ownership and violence.
Ecological studies currently provide contradictory evidence on violence and firearms ownership. For example, in the United States, suicide appears to be positively associated with rates of firearms ownership, but homicide is not. In contrast, in comparisons among countries, the association between rates of suicide and gun ownership is nonexistent or very weak but there is a substantial association between gun ownership and homicide. These cross-country comparisons reflect the fact that the suicide rate in the United States ranks toward the middle of industrialized countries, whereas the U.S. homicide rate is much higher than in all other developed countries.
The committee cannot determine whether these associations demonstrate causal relationships. There are three key problems. First, as noted above, these studies do not adequately address the problem of self-selection. Second, these studies must rely on proxy measures of ownership that are certain to create biases of unknown magnitude and direction. Third, because the ecological correlations are at a higher geographic level of aggregation, there is no way of knowing whether the homicides or suicides occurred in the same areas in which the firearms are owned.
In summary, the committee concludes that existing research studies and data include a wealth of descriptive information on homicide, suicide, and firearms, but, because of the limitations of existing data and methods, do not credibly demonstrate a causal relationship between the ownership of firearms and the causes or prevention of criminal violence or suicide. Emphasis mine.
I already addressed this. Causal relationships are extremely hard to establish in such areas of study (especially when funding for further extensive research tends to be blocked by gun advocates). The significant correlations that have been established, however, more than justify cautionary policy change of a limited degree - nobody is asking for a massive and obligatory removal of the guns owned by the population, but rather for better supervision of gun sales and of who has access to guns. Your initial point therefore clearly does not stand; this is clearly not an example of liberals "ignoring reality" or even ignoring what scientific studies have shown - quite the opposite. It's called taking precautionary steps based on significant but insufficient data.
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On August 15 2013 22:56 DoubleReed wrote:Set your irony meters to lethal. Romney wins food stamp districtsShow nested quote +Bloomberg — As the U.S. economy recovers from the worst recession since the Great Depression, the explosive growth of food stamps remains a lingering legacy. And now the program comes with an irony, as the Republicans seeking to cut it also represent vast numbers of recipients.
Among the 254 counties where food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them in last year’s presidential election, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by Bloomberg. Kentucky’s Owsley County, which backed Romney with 81 percent of its vote, has the largest proportion of food stamp recipients among those that he carried.
Not to be a pedant or something but that stat is based on counties where food stamp recipients doubled, from what baseline it does not say. For all we know, 212 of those counties doubled from 1 person to 2 people on food stamps and the rest of the article cherrypicks the one district where there's a lot of food stamp users. That's probably not true but that one statistic in absence of any others could mean any number of things.
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On August 15 2013 22:56 DoubleReed wrote:Set your irony meters to lethal. Romney wins food stamp districtsShow nested quote +Bloomberg — As the U.S. economy recovers from the worst recession since the Great Depression, the explosive growth of food stamps remains a lingering legacy. And now the program comes with an irony, as the Republicans seeking to cut it also represent vast numbers of recipients.
Among the 254 counties where food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them in last year’s presidential election, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by Bloomberg. Kentucky’s Owsley County, which backed Romney with 81 percent of its vote, has the largest proportion of food stamp recipients among those that he carried.
I'm not surprised, for a few reasons.
I wouldn't have expected areas hit hardest by the recovery to vote for the incumbent.
People still working are often resentful towards those not working and on benefits.
Areas with a low cost of living (rural, southern) are more likely to see the benefits as 'too generous'.
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On August 16 2013 01:25 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 22:56 DoubleReed wrote:Set your irony meters to lethal. Romney wins food stamp districtsBloomberg — As the U.S. economy recovers from the worst recession since the Great Depression, the explosive growth of food stamps remains a lingering legacy. And now the program comes with an irony, as the Republicans seeking to cut it also represent vast numbers of recipients.
Among the 254 counties where food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them in last year’s presidential election, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by Bloomberg. Kentucky’s Owsley County, which backed Romney with 81 percent of its vote, has the largest proportion of food stamp recipients among those that he carried. I'm not surprised, for a few reasons. I wouldn't have expected areas hit hardest by the recovery to vote for the incumbent. People still working are often resentful towards those not working and on benefits. Areas with a low cost of living (rural, southern) are more likely to see the benefits as 'too generous'.
Yea, that's what figured after I recovered from irony shock. I didn't even consider Zeal's point though.
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The history of the robot future’s future history![[image loading]](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/files/2013/08/OccuDistribution-590x334.png) The graph represents three decades of US middle class employment shrinking as a share of the employed labour force, with the occupations along the graph’s X-axis proceeding left to right from the least- to the highest-paid. The top four occupations and three of the bottom four have increased their share of employment, at the relative expense of the middle three. It comes via this Third Way paper by Frank Levy of MIT and Richard Murnane of Harvard, which includes an extended section regarding the trends (emphasis ours): "The hollowing out is the result of multiple factors, but it is consistent with the idea that occupations subject to computer substitution grow relatively slowly. Low wage work—Personal Care, Personal Services, Food Preparation, and Building and Grounds Cleaning—have all grown in importance and all involve non-routine physical work that is hard to computerize. Technicians and Professional and Managerial Occupations also have grown in importance. All involve abstract, unstructured cognitive work that is hard to computerize. Moreover, all rely on computers as complements including jobs like Network Manager that wouldn’t exist without computers." "By contrast, occupations in the middle of the distribution—Machine Operators, Production, Craft and Repair Occupations, Office and Administrative—have declined in importance. From the perspective of 1979, each of these occupations contained significant amounts of routine work that could be expressed in deductive or inductive rules and so were candidates for computer substitution and/or offshoring."
In other words, the middle class shouldn't like skynet 
The article goes on about how this trend is expected to continue, with some further commentary.
Also, a link to the report they referenced.
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On August 16 2013 01:28 DoubleReed wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2013 01:25 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On August 15 2013 22:56 DoubleReed wrote:Set your irony meters to lethal. Romney wins food stamp districtsBloomberg — As the U.S. economy recovers from the worst recession since the Great Depression, the explosive growth of food stamps remains a lingering legacy. And now the program comes with an irony, as the Republicans seeking to cut it also represent vast numbers of recipients.
Among the 254 counties where food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them in last year’s presidential election, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by Bloomberg. Kentucky’s Owsley County, which backed Romney with 81 percent of its vote, has the largest proportion of food stamp recipients among those that he carried. I'm not surprised, for a few reasons. I wouldn't have expected areas hit hardest by the recovery to vote for the incumbent. People still working are often resentful towards those not working and on benefits. Areas with a low cost of living (rural, southern) are more likely to see the benefits as 'too generous'. Yea, that's what figured after I recovered from irony shock. I didn't even consider Zeal's point though.
I forgot to mention, there's also been a recent trend of poverty moving out of the cities and into the suburbs (and those with money moving back to the cities). So those typical to vote republican areas could also have seen a big bump in food stamp use.
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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in an interview published Wednesday that a “handful of things” in Obamacare “probably are OK.”
“I mean, there are a handful of things in the 2,700 page bill that probably are OK,” he told the Kentucky TV station WYMT. “But that doesn’t warrant a 2,700 page takeover of all American health care.”
McConnell, who is spending the month at home campaigning for his 2014 re-election bid, called Obamacare “single worst piece of legislation passed in the last 50 years in the country. We need to get rid of it, and I think we get rid of it piece by piece.”
In an ordinary political environment, McConnell’s remarks would hardly be newsworthy. A bill as long and complicated as the Affordable Care Act, which despite its maze of regulations is fundamentally modeled on free-market ideas and includes many Republican amendments, will surely have some elements a GOP lawmaker can support.
While he didn’t explain which provisions are acceptable to him, last year various Republicans voiced support for popular Obamacare components such as protections for people with preexisting conditions, letting Americans under 27 remain on a parent’s insurance plan and closing the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap for seniors.
But the political environment surrounding Obamacare is anything but ordinary — with the ferocious Republican assault on the bill, the party’s exaggerated warnings that it will ruin American freedom, and the base’s determination to scrap every last bit of it. So McConnell’s remarks quickly became fodder for his conservative primary challenger, Matt Bevin, who accused the GOP leader’s of “flip-flop[ping] on repealing Obamacare in its entirety.”
“We have to do whatever it takes to repeal Obamacare, and if we can’t repeal it, we have a responsibility to the American people to defund it,” Bevin said in a statement Thursday, responding to McConnell’s remarks. “If Mitch McConnell had ever worked in the private sector, he might understand that. If Senator McConnell is not willing to act to end Obamacare, he needs to get out of the way.”
Source
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Well, we can already see how the elections of '14 will go. It all comes down to one big question.
"Are You Conservative Enough?"
It can be a game show like Whose line 
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On August 16 2013 03:55 farvacola wrote:Well, we can already see how the elections of '14 will go. It all comes down to one big question. "Are You Conservative Enough?" It can be a game show like Whose line
Everything's made up and the votes don't matter?
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On August 15 2013 13:08 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2013 10:27 sunprince wrote:On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:Every single on of the ACLU's official positions reflect liberal ideology. This includes hypocritical positions in which the ACLU sides against civil liberties, such as in the case of gun ownership (a personal freedom that ended up inverted in which side supports it in American politics due to political expediency), as well as cases such as the due process issue with university judicial policy I talked about in the previous post. The ACLU does not take a position on gun control. Yes, they do; you just failed to understand your own source. The ACLU's position is that the Second Amendment protects a collective right to own guns, rather than an individual right. In other words, they disagree that individual citizens have a right to own firearms. On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:
Honestly, I always find this position baffling. Free Speech is liberal? Right to Privacy is liberal? Due Process is liberal? This sounds like something a hardcore liberal like me would say. You're basically saying that the opposite of the ACLU are a bunch of authoritarian freaks. That's not the argument I'm making, and you know it. The point I'm making is that wherever there is a debate between liberals and conservatives on an issue, the ACLU agrees with the liberal position. Neither liberals nor conservatives oppose free speech, right to privacy, or due process in general, but the devil is in the details and the ACLU takes the liberal side whenever there's a divide. On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:Yet another red herring, but I'll address this too. My claim was that women, as a class, have not been historically oppressed. Additionally, I didn't dismiss your argument on gays, I fully addressed and debunked it. Except those same arguments you used for gays works precisely with women. Oppression of women has also been established. The Abrahamic Religion stuff applies just as much with women. You're addressing of the issue was simply "Nah, homosexuals were totally oppressed and it's not like women at all for some reason." Whoooosh! Right over your head. That's not what I said and you know it. I clearly addressed the point about gays here. I gave you an example of unjust treatment suffered by gays, which demonstrates why they were oppressed. I also pointed out the quality of life metric issue: women have higher quality of life by virtually all empirical metrics compared to men, which calls the notion of "oppression" into question. Regardless, you're missing the whole "burden of proof" issue in the larger discussion: you don't get to declare that women were oppressed without evidence. If you want to make that claim, then advance evidence to support it. I'm merely being charitable by giving you my counterevidence early. On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:
And saying that "women didn't rise up therefore they weren't oppressed" is a blatant example of Just-World Hypothesis. For example. But in the course of that thread (and pretty much any other topic on feminism), you are prone to the assumption that women are responsible for their own misfortune. Just-World Hypothesis. And the funny part is when you say that anything else is just misogyny. Another strawman. My argument is that women not only didn't rise up, but they were happy to support the status quo. In other words, my argument is that women were content, not oppressed. Their behavior is simply evidence that they were content. The real misogyny here is in your sexist assumption that women were so weak and pathetic that they allowed themselves to be oppressed without doing anything about it, unlike every other oppressed group in the history of the world. Does it make you feel like a big strong man every time you declare that women are too weak to defend themselves? Disgusting. On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:Criticizing feminism does not make one an MRA, just as criticizing sexism does not make one a feminist. MRAs do not have a monopoly on criticizing feminism, and I've indicated before that I while I agree with some MRA arguments, I generally consider them whiners.
Since you are familiar with me, you may have noticed that my nuanced positions often mean that I both agree with and disagree with most popular ideological camps. I similarly defend abortion rights or gun rights whenever the topic comes up, but that makes me neither a feminist nor an NRA gun nut.
To be fair, I said you had an MRA-like stance. And quite frankly, even though I meant it as an insult, I'm surprised you took it as an insult. I don't take it as an insult. I'm just pointing out that it's untrue, just as it would be untrue to label me a liberal, a conservative, a feminist, or a gun nut, on the basis of a skewed sample of my less popular opinions. On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:Point out my logical fallacies and errors, instead of merely claiming that I make them. Show, don't tell.
TL;DR: Address my actual arguments instead of resorting to personal attacks, shaming tactics, and logical fallacies. Spend more time researching the topics being discussed, instead of searching through my post history to find mud to fling. You're not fooling me or anyone else here with your failure to engage in reasoned debate, except maybe yourself and your fellow liberal partisan ideologues who already agree with you. I notice that you're asking opposite things of me here. Either I have to go further into your history to point out logical fallacies, or engage with the current debate (which is the ACLU defending the sexual assault stuff). What I meant was, you should be sticking with the current debate, and calling out logical fallacies as they crop up. That's more or less what reasoned debate is: discussing the issue at hand, rather than dragging up unrelated discussions to try to engage in personal attacks. On August 15 2013 09:07 DoubleReed wrote:
My point here is to explain why it's not worth to engage you in reasoned debate, because you are actually not a reasonable person. I suppose I could try again with the ACLU sexual assault stuff. Would you like that?
My other major point here is to entertain all the lovely folks out there. Hence the popcorn. If you don't consider me a reasonable person, then feel free to ignore my posts. If you're indeed replying to me purely for the purpose of personal attacks and trolling, as you claim, then that would be not just against TL rules, but the specific rules for this thread, would it not? Ok DO NOT bring your bullshit pseudo-intellectual drivel about women's oppression or lack thereof into this thread. It is not the place for it.
I am not the one who brought this up, and I am not speaking to you. If you don't want to discuss this topic, then don't read posts on the topic or respond to them.
On August 15 2013 13:08 Stratos_speAr wrote:
You were thoroughly tongue-lashed in the last thread for being so intellectually dishonest and having absolutely no clue what the definition of "oppressed" truly is.
Anyone who actually reads the thread will notice that I'm the only one who presented a source for the definition of oppression: the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner. The fact that you choose to ignore this definition and come up with convenient definitions of your own in order to suit your argument does nothing to dispute the definition I presented.
The only intellectual dishonesty going on is the refusal of you and your ilk to actually present any support for your claims that "women were historically oppressed". Refusing to accept that the burden of proof is on you to make that positive claim, and instead demanding that others debunk you, is clear-cut intellectual dishonesty. The fact that you had the weight of numbers to form a dog pile doesn't at all imply any sort of tongue-lashing, it just means more of you are failing at rational debate.
Furthermore, neither you nor anyone else addressed the empirical evidence I showed regarding quality of life metrics: if women were truly historically oppressed, then why have they historically outperformed men on virtually all quality of life metrics (e.g. measurable outcomes)? Notice also how this stands in stark contrast to nearly all oppressed groups ever; peasants, slaves, untouchables, ethnic/religious minorities, etc. all perform worse on quality of life metrics than their counterparts, as we would expect from oppressed groups.
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EPT
