US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4724

On August 12 2016 23:29 Doodsmack wrote:
To be fair, as a Hillary supporter, the recent emails do prove that she sold access to State through CF. And that's very bad corruption. But Trump is so fundamentally flawed as to be a non-candidate.

On August 12 2016 23:34 biology]major wrote:


Don't reward corruption then. Regardless of who is president we will carry about our lives in the same way we always have.

On August 12 2016 23:39 Doodsmack wrote:


I have no indication that Trump is less corrupt, given his various admissions and history. He donated to Hillary, keep in mind. That wasn't for the sake of his South Florida golf course.

Also your second sentence is absurd.

On August 12 2016 23:36 farvacola wrote:

That's nonsense; I personally know at least a dozen people who rely on federal programs that Trump has either directly or indirectly promised to cut.

On August 12 2016 22:23 nothingmuch wrote:
Hats off to all you guys trying to/ engaging with Trump supporters. I just can't even imagine how to begin. I see this man, I hear what he says and how he behaves, and in my mind there's just not enough fantasy to even remotely fathom a world in which anybody can see anything but a conniving, cowardly clown with an ego the size of the planet. What could possibly be going on in the heads of those people cheering for him?

The Bell Curve- the bane of Democracy.

On August 12 2016 23:03 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I think blanket statements of the type 'everyone who votes for him is stupid or selfish' are wrong, baseless and harmful to the political discourse. Equating political preference with intelligence doesn't really hold up either (you can make that case in regards to swallowing a populist message or not, but not for the conservative/liberal dichotomy. And while trump is populist, many of his supporters seem to be his supporters because he is the non-liberal alternative with a chance at winning).

I also understand why it's easy to make these statements and draw these conclusions, but I've seen enough people whose intelligence clearly equal or surpass my own whose political opinions greatly differ from my own to draw the conclusion that intelligence and political position is hardly related. And I think the selfishness-selflessness- separation is also a very difficult distinction to make - my own perceived selflessness normally originates from some degree of selfishness, not in the ayn randian greed is good sense, but in the sense that being selfless makes me feel good about myself - but I can only be selfless as long as it is not self-defeating. People from less privileged positions cannot be equally selfless without it being more self-defeating.

On August 12 2016 23:37 LegalLord wrote:
You have to be remarkably blind if up until now, you were to think that Hillary is clean and that all of the myriad accusations of corruption and shitty dealings are wrong just because the Republicans pursued a few overblown smear campaigns against her.

I only wish this had come out a year ago when it could have actually influenced people towards a better choice. Instead we get "oh well I suck but Trump so vote for me anyways."

On August 12 2016 23:48 Danglars wrote:

You'd better hope they can't hear you. It's exactly the kind of attitude that will reflexively cause them to fire back ... if that's all you got, I'm never going to engage with you guys! Both candidates have VERY deep unfavorables it's like a game of who's the less shitty smelling septic tank. And when a voter comes out with the wrong guy, you're not even going to engage? And this is conservatively a third to a little under half the country? Well, they'll keep sending representatives to Congress with the expectation that they'll oppose steadfastly the kind of ideas offered by dismissive partisans of the other party.


If only more people can come to an understanding of what it means to share a country with people of radically different views. I also agree that too much is made of voting for your own self interest from people that presume to carry higher morals.

On August 12 2016 23:44 biology]major wrote:


I don't mean that in the sense that president has no power, but that the gridlock will slow everything down and mitigate a lot of the crazy expectations the base on both sides have.

Privately operated government prisons, which mostly detain migrants convicted of immigration offenses, are drastically more unsafe and punitive than other prisons in the federal system, a stinging investigation by the US Department of Justice’s inspector general has found.

Inmates at these 14 contract prisons, the only centers in the federal prison system that are privately operated, were nine times more likely to be placed on lockdown than inmates at other federal prisons and were frequently subjected to arbitrary solitary confinement. In two of the three contract prisons investigators routinely visited, new inmates were automatically placed in solitary confinement as a way of combating overcrowding, rather than for disciplinary issues.

The review also found that contract prison inmates were more likely to complain about medical care, treatment by prison staff and about the quality of food.

Contract prisons almost exclusively incarcerate low-risk inmates convicted of immigration offenses. These facilities house around 22,000 individuals, mostly deemed “low risk”, at an annual cost of $600m. They are operated by three private companies: Geo Group, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and Management and Training Corporation (MTC).

Investigators determined that these facilities were also more dangerous than others in the federal system. For example, the report found that inmate on inmate assaults were 28% higher in contract prisons, and confiscation of contraband mobile phones occurred eight times more.

At the Eden detention center in Texas, operated by CCA and one of the three institutions routinely visited by investigators, the inspector general found that staff failed to discipline inmates in over 50% of disciplinary incidents.

On August 13 2016 00:04 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I also think this guy

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/763380671796678656

should be fired immediately. I know this comment is from 2010 and that he wasn't her strategist at the time being, but if we're demonizing Trump for hiring incompetent and trigger happy people then she should be held up to that standard as well.

Edit: oh damnit. Looks like I kinda fell for the whole, 'share before you've fully educated yourself' ploy - I can't actually see any indication of him being a Hillary Strategist beyond this being claimed in the tweet. Snopes couldn't either.

On August 13 2016 00:14 zlefin wrote:
Legal -> I'd say she's somewhat more corrupt than average, but it's hard to tell reliably.
The basic problem to me is: you can't use: "where there's smoke there's fire" to measure corruption well when someone has been throwing smoke grenades at them. The large number of unjustified accusations make it harder to identify the legitimate ones unless you look really closely; and opens up a lot of room to magnify the effects of minor biases.

And the eternal question of how much looks suspicious when you look really close at something; I don't have a good comparison base of people who've been look at nearly this close. Medicine has the same problem.