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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. |
Interestingly, when Trump made the "take guns away" comment, Fox and Friends was asking him some policy questions. It's almost like they responded to recent commentary on the type of questions Trump gets. They asked Trump to define stop and frisk, and to explain its pros and cons. Not having a cogent answer, he talked about taking guns away - even wording it to say "take their guns away".
It will be very interesting to see Trump at a debate on policy. The Republican debates largely consisted of wrestling matches which played to Trump's narrow issue profile.
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On September 24 2016 00:14 WolfintheSheep wrote:Well, looks like he stepped on the one amendment his voting base won't stand to have trampled.
Nah, they don't give a shit if black people lose their guns.
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WASHINGTON — With a new president on the horizon, a key Senate committee moved Wednesday to protect long-standing priorities of the nation’s space program from the potential upheaval of an incoming administration.
Members of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee passed a bipartisan bill authorizing $19.5 billion to continue work on a Mars mission and efforts to send astronauts on private rockets to the International Space Station from U.S. soil — regardless of shifting political winds.
Lawmakers haven't forgotten that President Obama, shortly after taking office, scrapped the Bush administration’s Constellation program that sought to send astronauts back to the moon. Many members of Congress felt stung by the cancellation and angry that Obama hadn't consulted them.
“We have seen in the past the importance of stability and predictability in NASA and space exploration, (and) that whenever one has a change in administration, we have seen the chaos that can be caused by the cancellation of major programs,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the subcommittee overseeing the space program. “The impact in terms of jobs lost, the impact in terms of money wasted has been significant.”
The $19.5 billion authorized for fiscal 2017 under the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2016 is the same amount approved by House appropriators and slightly more than the $19.3 billion approved by members of the Senate Appropriations Committee. It's not clear when the Senate bill will reach the floor, where it's expected to pass.
The Obama administration has proposed spending $19 billion on NASA programs.
Under the Senate bill, NASA would have an official goal of sending a crewed mission to Mars within the next 25 years, the first time a trip to the Red Planet would be mandated by law.
"Fifty-five years after President Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the moon, the Senate is challenging NASA to put humans on Mars,” said Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, senior Democrat on the Commerce panel. “The priorities that we’ve laid out for NASA in this bill mark the beginning of a new era of American spaceflight.”
Aside from Nelson and Cruz, the measure was co-sponsored by Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida and Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Democrats Gary Peters of Michigan and Tom Udall of New Mexico.
The legislation would authorize money for different NASA components, including $4.5 billion for exploration, nearly $5 billion for space operations and $5.4 billion for science.
The bill does not order NASA to scrap its controversial plan to send astronauts to an asteroid and collect samples by 2021. But it would require the agency to routinely report to Congress on the mission’s progress and justify why it's worth the $1.4 billion price tag.
Source
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United States42014 Posts
On September 24 2016 00:13 Yoav wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2016 00:02 KwarK wrote:On September 23 2016 23:13 GoTuNk! wrote:On September 23 2016 22:12 Nevuk wrote:
After much thought I have come to a conclusion: It is pretty obvious that America is still running a slave Empire enforced by the police, via prisons that incarcerate black men for nonviolent crimes and use them for forced labor at a disproportionate rate. Cops in the US were originally created for the purpose of catching runaway slaves, their institutional memory is merely becoming impossible to ignore due to the proliferation of video evidence. Shooting unarmed black men is no odd aberration. Yes, that is an accurate portrait of the country that run a civil war to end slavism within itself and follow trough with the rest of the world. If you wanna go trough the history rabit hole, did you know muslims captured millions of slaves (from Europe and Africa), but have no black population because they castrated them? Yes. Slavery has a long history all around the world, everybody knows that. Additionally, although slavery continues to be a problem in parts of the world, it was largely the ideals of 19th Century European philosophy, combined with the power to enforce those ideals on the resisting world, that broke slavery as an official institution. Obviously slavery continues to endure through other means because people just really like owning other people and it's hard to stamp out but yes, we all know that slavery isn't exclusively white and that the main global force behind the opposition to slavery came from white dudes (Haiti notwithstanding). There are some other fun cases like Sri Lanka I believe where a Buddhist king banned slavery in the 4th Century for ideological reasons but sure, slavery isn't just a white thing. Slavery as it relates to western nations is a white thing though because the ones in power who were buying and owning the slaves there were white. This is all true, but it's worth mentioning that the 18th and 19th century anti-slavery movements (both in America and Britain) were largely intellectually backed and practically operated by the religious left of the time. The Enlightenment philosophers were mostly along for the ride.
Can we go with them feeding into each other? Obviously we have liberal philosophers who found nations built on liberty and all men being born equal and who also own slaves. Equally we have bishops in palaces passing judgement on their fellow man. The Reformation and the Enlightenment were both philosophical movements that questioned the established structures from theological and secular angles. Hell, even Jesus's philosophy had pretty big secular elements. But you're 110% right that I didn't give sufficient credit to the religious opposition to slavery.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On September 24 2016 00:21 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:Show nested quote +WASHINGTON — With a new president on the horizon, a key Senate committee moved Wednesday to protect long-standing priorities of the nation’s space program from the potential upheaval of an incoming administration.
Members of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee passed a bipartisan bill authorizing $19.5 billion to continue work on a Mars mission and efforts to send astronauts on private rockets to the International Space Station from U.S. soil — regardless of shifting political winds.
Lawmakers haven't forgotten that President Obama, shortly after taking office, scrapped the Bush administration’s Constellation program that sought to send astronauts back to the moon. Many members of Congress felt stung by the cancellation and angry that Obama hadn't consulted them.
“We have seen in the past the importance of stability and predictability in NASA and space exploration, (and) that whenever one has a change in administration, we have seen the chaos that can be caused by the cancellation of major programs,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the subcommittee overseeing the space program. “The impact in terms of jobs lost, the impact in terms of money wasted has been significant.”
The $19.5 billion authorized for fiscal 2017 under the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2016 is the same amount approved by House appropriators and slightly more than the $19.3 billion approved by members of the Senate Appropriations Committee. It's not clear when the Senate bill will reach the floor, where it's expected to pass.
The Obama administration has proposed spending $19 billion on NASA programs.
Under the Senate bill, NASA would have an official goal of sending a crewed mission to Mars within the next 25 years, the first time a trip to the Red Planet would be mandated by law.
"Fifty-five years after President Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the moon, the Senate is challenging NASA to put humans on Mars,” said Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, senior Democrat on the Commerce panel. “The priorities that we’ve laid out for NASA in this bill mark the beginning of a new era of American spaceflight.”
Aside from Nelson and Cruz, the measure was co-sponsored by Republicans Marco Rubio of Florida and Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Democrats Gary Peters of Michigan and Tom Udall of New Mexico.
The legislation would authorize money for different NASA components, including $4.5 billion for exploration, nearly $5 billion for space operations and $5.4 billion for science.
The bill does not order NASA to scrap its controversial plan to send astronauts to an asteroid and collect samples by 2021. But it would require the agency to routinely report to Congress on the mission’s progress and justify why it's worth the $1.4 billion price tag. Source
In this case I think the Republicans were right and that Constellation was probably the right way to go with the space program.
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United States42014 Posts
On September 24 2016 00:20 Doodsmack wrote:
Interestingly, when Trump made the "take guns away" comment, Fox and Friends was asking him some policy questions. It's almost like they responded to recent commentary on the type of questions Trump gets. They asked Trump to define stop and frisk, and to explain its pros and cons. Not having a cogent answer, he talked about taking guns away - even wording it to say "take their guns away".
It will be very interesting to see Trump at a debate on policy. The Republican debates largely consisted of wrestling matches which played to Trump's narrow issue profile.
Did someone say wrestling matches?
https://i.imgur.com/IbpwztR.mp4
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On September 23 2016 23:26 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2016 23:20 TheDwf wrote:On September 23 2016 23:13 GoTuNk! wrote:On September 23 2016 22:12 Nevuk wrote:
After much thought I have come to a conclusion: It is pretty obvious that America is still running a slave Empire enforced by the police, via prisons that incarcerate black men for nonviolent crimes and use them for forced labor at a disproportionate rate. Cops in the US were originally created for the purpose of catching runaway slaves, their institutional memory is merely becoming impossible to ignore due to the proliferation of video evidence. Shooting unarmed black men is no odd aberration. Yes, that is an accurate portrait of the country that run a civil war to end slavism within itself and follow trough with the rest of the world. If you wanna go trough the history rabit hole, did you know muslims captured millions of slaves (from Europe and Africa), but have no black population because they castrated them? Always this “others did it too” argument... So? How is the Arab slave trade relevant to the current situation in the USA? I see a lot of white shaming and USA bashing in this thread in general. For example America is still running a slave Empire enforced by the police. That is not even close to reality, while no one raises their voice to critizice actual brutal racism and sexism that is currently going on in a bunch of middle eastern countries, where woman legally do not have rights (and blacks were hunted out of existence). The west is still a beacon of rationality and civilization, and the greatest place to live in the entire history of the world, by far. Obviously it can be better, but we should be turning to our core values that created this great civilization, not the other way around as the left is trying to.
Ooooookay, the formula is excessive, adjust the words in your head and try to look at the actual point instead...
You can denounce many things which happen outside of the society in which you live, the truth is that you will often have approximatively zero impact doing so. Everyone here can write on the Internet that the status of women is terrible in Saudi Arabia, then what? Nothing happens. I have a long history of reading discussions like this, and most of the time those comparisons are only used to deny or minimize the issues in your own society. All I read here is self-complacency, “some things are worse elsewhere so shut up”.
Name any “core value” of the so-called “Western civilization” and we can find dozens of counter-examples where those values were happily violated. Given the past AND what is (still) happening now, some modesty would be nice rather than permanent ethnocentrist self-satisfaction.
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On September 23 2016 23:44 bo1b wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2016 23:36 zlefin wrote:On September 23 2016 23:32 bo1b wrote:On September 23 2016 23:29 zlefin wrote:On September 23 2016 23:26 GoTuNk! wrote:On September 23 2016 23:20 TheDwf wrote:On September 23 2016 23:13 GoTuNk! wrote:On September 23 2016 22:12 Nevuk wrote:
After much thought I have come to a conclusion: It is pretty obvious that America is still running a slave Empire enforced by the police, via prisons that incarcerate black men for nonviolent crimes and use them for forced labor at a disproportionate rate. Cops in the US were originally created for the purpose of catching runaway slaves, their institutional memory is merely becoming impossible to ignore due to the proliferation of video evidence. Shooting unarmed black men is no odd aberration. Yes, that is an accurate portrait of the country that run a civil war to end slavism within itself and follow trough with the rest of the world. If you wanna go trough the history rabit hole, did you know muslims captured millions of slaves (from Europe and Africa), but have no black population because they castrated them? Always this “others did it too” argument... So? How is the Arab slave trade relevant to the current situation in the USA? I see a lot of white shaming and USA bashing in this thread in general. For example America is still running a slave Empire enforced by the police. That is not even close to reality, while no one raises their voice to critizice actual brutal racism and sexism that is currently going on in a bunch of middle eastern countries, where woman legally do not have rights (and blacks were hunted out of existence). The west is still a beacon of rationality and civilization, and the greatest place to live in the entire history of the world, by far. Obviously it can be better, but we should be turning to our core values that created this great civilization, not the other way around as the left is trying to. tons of people call out that behavior in the middle east. your assertion that noone is raising their voice against it is flat out wrong. Australia is regularly considered one of the most racist places on the planet for its actions decades ago, their are places in Africa genociding people still today. i'm not sure how that's relevant to my point. at any rate; some idiots evaluate things poorly; and they're loud. so? and considered the most racist by whom, by what metric and analyses? By loud mouths at university, people on prime time television, MSN for whatever reason. I hear every tuesday (I have to walk past the social sciences area to get to my engineering section) how racist we are. http://www.msn.com/en-za/lifestyle/experiences/analysis-10-most-racist-countries-in-the-world/ar-CC7rXCHere's an article you may have received if you didn't change your default home page in Australia.
like I said; some loud mouth idiots said something stupid. there's a lot of loud mouth idiots in the world; and they post a poorly sourced unsound list of how racist various places are.
That some idiots repeat stupid things alot doesn't mean they are generally considered to be true.
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On September 24 2016 00:21 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2016 00:14 WolfintheSheep wrote:On September 24 2016 00:12 TheTenthDoc wrote:Trump clarified that his stop and frisk is actually "stop, frisk, and take guns away." Presumably from black people, so it's not gun confiscation. And also that it's for Chicago. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/donald-trump-gun-rights-stop-friskNote that Chicago already has stop and frisk. Great words, great people, great leader. Well, looks like he stepped on the one amendment his voting base won't stand to have trampled. Nah, they don't give a shit if black people lose their guns.
constitution only really matters up till the 12th amendment or so anyways
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United States42014 Posts
On September 24 2016 00:40 ticklishmusic wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2016 00:21 Plansix wrote:On September 24 2016 00:14 WolfintheSheep wrote:On September 24 2016 00:12 TheTenthDoc wrote:Trump clarified that his stop and frisk is actually "stop, frisk, and take guns away." Presumably from black people, so it's not gun confiscation. And also that it's for Chicago. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/donald-trump-gun-rights-stop-friskNote that Chicago already has stop and frisk. Great words, great people, great leader. Well, looks like he stepped on the one amendment his voting base won't stand to have trampled. Nah, they don't give a shit if black people lose their guns. constitution only really matters up till the 12th amendment or so anyways
Before those darn liberals ruined it all.
But I'd still quite like to see a discussion of what I mentioned last night. The pro-gun control left has kinda left the black population high and dry on the issue of the Second Amendment by conceding the argument that unarmed = unjustified shooting and armed = justified without enough of a fight. It is generally accepted that Americans have the right to carry a tool that can be used to end a life with them in public spaces. With this in mind it must also be accepted that Americans are allowed to have a pretty high base level of potential threat, simply exercising your constitutional rights means that you're able to have the potential to end a life. And yet by accepting the "did he have a gun?" narrative we accept that the police can respond to a potential threat with lethal force, without necessarily requiring reaching for the gun or pointing the gun or any other evidence of a conscious choice to turn that potential threat into an actual threat. Clearly these two principles should not coexist. It should not be constitutionally guaranteed that Americans are allowed to be a big potential threat to the agents of the state while simultaneously having the agents of the state be entitled to respond to that potential threat with lethal force. Something has to give there if the constitutional rights of Americans are to be protected. And I will add that the issue has somewhat been resolved in white communities where the police generally don't shoot unless the potential threat becomes an actual one. The result is a selective application of constitutional rights which has been conceded by both sides, the left because they think that he shouldn't have had a gun anyway because guns are bad and the right because they think he shouldn't have had a gun anyway because blacks are bad.
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Love when the media makes a headline out of an autopsy report using the term "homicide".
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On September 24 2016 00:50 KwarK wrote:
It should not be constitutionally guaranteed that Americans are allowed to be a big potential threat to the agents of the state while simultaneously having the agents of the state be entitled to respond to that potential threat with lethal force. Something has to give there if the constitutional rights of Americans are to be protected. And I will add that the issue has somewhat been resolved in white communities where the police generally don't shoot unless the potential threat becomes an actual one. The result is a selective application of constitutional rights which has been conceded by both sides, the left because they think that he shouldn't have had a gun anyway because guns are bad and the right because they think he shouldn't have had a gun anyway because blacks are bad.
It's not a left or right or black or white issue. If you arm every citizen you end up in some Hobbesian 'war of all against all' scenario. You can't have every citizen being a potential threat and at the same time demand trust. It's not possible. That's why you grant the state the monopoly of force in the first place. It's why the UK has less dead police officers in a century than the US has in a year. Even if you get rid of all racism and poverty this problem will still exist.
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Wow. The Ig Nobel prize for Peace is on point this year. It was awarded for the work " On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit", which is an amazingly awesome article (free link). It is also rather relevant to this year's presidential election (given a certain candidate's propensity to spout bullshit), as well as quite a number of the intellectually dishonest posts made frequently in this thread.
For those who don't want to read the whole article (recommended anyway), their conclusions:
Profundity ratings for statements containing a random collection of buzzwords were very strongly correlated with a selective collection of actual “Tweets” from Deepak Chopra’s “Twitter” feed (r’s = .88–89). At the time of this writing, Chopra has over 2.5 million followers on “Twitter” and has written more than twenty New York Times bestsellers. Bullshit is not only common; it is popular. Chopra is, of course, just one example among many. Using vagueness or ambiguity to mask a lack of meaningfulness is surely common in political rhetoric, marketing, and even academia (Sokal, 2008). Indeed, as intimated by Frankfurt (2005), bullshitting is something that we likely all engage in to some degree (p. 1): “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.” One benefit of gaining a better understanding of how we reject other’s bullshit is that it may teach us to be more cognizant of our own bullshit.
The construction of a reliable index of bullshit receptivity is an important first step toward gaining a better understanding
of the underlying cognitive and social mechanisms that determine if and when bullshit is detected. Our bullshit receptivity
scale was associated with a relatively wide range of important psychological factors. This is a valuable first step toward gaining a better understanding of the psychology of bullshit. The development of interventions and strategies that help individuals guard against bullshit is an important additional goal that requires considerable attention from cognitive and social psychologists. That people vary in their receptivity toward bullshit is perhaps less surprising than the fact that psychological scientists have heretofore neglected this issue. Accordingly, although this manuscript may not be truly profound, it is indeed meaningful.
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On September 23 2016 23:03 bo1b wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2016 22:50 ChristianS wrote:On September 23 2016 21:18 xDaunt wrote:On September 23 2016 18:42 Acrofales wrote:On September 23 2016 17:16 ChristianS wrote:On September 23 2016 15:49 Danglars wrote:On September 23 2016 15:03 ChristianS wrote:
Jesus this thread is depressing sometimes.
The last ~24 hours of discussion have put a sobering thought into my head, and I wonder what you guys think of it. Basically, in the last 50 or so years, there's been a strong anti-racist movement in the country as a whole. Laws that discriminate against blacks became widely considered unacceptable, public figures are shunned for expressing racist ideas or using racist epithets. The implied justification was that we as a society were making a concerted effort to eliminate racism as much as possible, and drive whatever resistant strains that survived to . Considered with other historical moves towards equality (elimination of slavery, blacks joining the military, Brown v. Board, etc.), it fit nicely with an overarching narrative of racial progress.
Maybe this is just a problem with anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me those attitudes are completely different in a lot of people today. Hardened Trump supporters often try to deny that Trump is a racist, but far more frequently I see people that just don't seem to care much. They might even lean toward thinking he probably is, but it's just not that important an issue. This is really baffling to me, since for my whole life there's been a widespread cultural agreement that overt racism is one of the ugliest sides of human civilization and absolutely cannot be tolerated, but in the broad view of history, racism is absolutely the norm. Not always as bad as early American South racism, but it's always been pretty normal to distrust people with different cultural and ethnic background than you, treat them worse, value their life less than that of your family or friends or tribe members. I always figured that was just part of progress – unlike humans for most of history, we have cars and refrigerators and computers and a prevailing cultural understanding that racism is bad. It's a nice stroll through memory lane, but you make a sudden leap into modern times by contrasting the civil rights era with Trump and his supporters. Sit at the back of the bus was racism. Separate eating establishments based on race was racism. Immigration policy isn't. Political invective on several issues isn't (though abrasive speech will still cause others to bristle no matter the subject). You're right to call it anecdotal, and it's intensely subjective. You'll see the comparisons to late 1800s racism and xenophobia, others will see you as a wannabe crusader longing for a bygone era but without a real civil rights cause today. Worth noting I never said Trump's immigration policy means he's racist. I was honestly more focused on Trump himself. Being prosecuted by Nixon's Justice Department for really explicitly discriminating against black tenants in his hotels back in the 70's. That stuff by Jack O'Donnell about how when he was president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump went off about not wanting a black guy as an accountant because blacks are lazy, and he only wants Jews counting his money. Calling Mexicans rapists. Those shitty stereotypes he embraced talking to the Republican Jewish Coalition. Y'know, that stuff. But I wasn't really looking to pick a fight either. I don't really long to be a civil rights crusader. The 50's and 60's sound awful, and I'm glad I didn't have to be around for it. I honestly wish that we were having a relatively normal election between, like, Tim Kaine and Jeb Bush, and I could tune out and read the occasional headline without click on it and maybe get around to registering to vote if I had nothing better to do, but I probably never would because I wouldn't care that much who won. Instead we've got a large, disgruntled population of lower- and middle-class white people who feel that they've been wronged by the world. They think they used to have some kind of glory and power, but now their manufacturing jobs are fading away and they're losing their privileged place in the world, and they feel betrayed and unsafe and powerless. We've got a demagogue candidate who's appealing to this population by telling them that they lost their power because of Mexicans and Muslims and China. He's parading around families of people that were raped or murdered by illegal Mexicans to gin up a rage against these foreigners that are raping and murdering their wives and children. He's saying the whole world is laughing at them because they don't win any more. And he's promising them that if they support him, then by the time he's done, nobody will laugh at them again. This is not a drill, this is how real life racial persecution gets started. This is the type of movement that used to lead to pogroms and lynchings and blood libel. People get so caught up in the movement and the propaganda and the cult of personality around a charismatic leader that they stop paying attention to facts and policy, to the point that you can explain to them that the crime rate is down, not up, that they lost their manufacturing jobs to the inexorable forces of globalism and no one can bring them back, and that illegal immigrants actually commit violent crime at a lower rate than the rest of the population, but it has absolutely no bearing on how they feel. My sobering thought was this: what if we're not on an inevitable march toward progress and greater racial equality? What if the anti-racist attitudes of the last 50 years aren't a lasting cultural achievement, but just a temporary backlash against the ugly racism of the 40's and 50's? People saw how hideous that Nazi movement was, and they saw the horrible treatment of blacks in the South, and the lynching of Emmett Till, and the dogs and firehoses deployed against civil rights protesters, and for a while it became fashionable to be against racism.
But now that all that stuff isn't such recent memory, racism takes on all of the advantages that made it prevalent in human society before. Scapegoating is an easy way to feel better about your problems. Stereotyping is almost inescapable in the psychology of how humans understand the world. Many apparent virtues that people are encouraged to cultivate (e.g. loyalty, empathy) can subconsciously promote tribalism (e.g. loyalty involves favoring those you're close to over those you're not, empathy encourages greater connection to people who are more like you). Racial minorities are often small enough in number that society can get weird impressions of them simply from having too small a sample size, and once a weird (especially negative) bias gets in place, confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy effects tend to maintain or expand that bias.
I've been hoping all the bigotry of the Trump movement would be remembered by history as a weird spike of bigotry as the white American middle class came to terms with several realities it had been in denial about for years. But what if history remembers these past ~50 years as that brief period where American society was largely anti-racist? My sobering thought is this: what if the current campaign against out-of-fashion ideas and racial realism won't be reversed for many years? What if the zealots of today, the current victors of the culture war, won't realize how hideous their own movement has become, nor how the '60s rebellion against authority became a puritanical persecution from authority (cultural leadership brought to you by Your Moral Betters™). Scapegoating and stereotyping of Trump supporters for social ills could continue, as much as I wish it would not. It is intensely psychological and the fight in every generation is to inspire the better angels of our nature. I'm hoping the atmosphere of moral scolds today are later regarded as a weird period of American history when people embraced racializing every issue to the detriment of true debate on the issues. When language was so bastardized and social media lynch mobs so emboldened that every political opinion was viewed by the color difference of the author & subject's skin. I look with some hope to the next generation. Today's left-leaning culture responds to criticism like a priest to sacrilege, and even young people today can see how bizarre it acts. It's far more likely that today's regress, disguised as progress, continues to win and that's a very sobering thought indeed. Seems like you're throwing out a lot of punches at stuff I'm not sure if you're assuming I support. I'm also not sure what's meant by terms like "racial realism." It seems to denote a position which acknowledges the realities of race (about which this "regressive left" is presumably in denial), but I'm not sure what realities you think those are. A white supremacist might say they're a "racial realist" for acknowledging that white people are better than black people. An SJW might call themselves a "racial realist" for acknowledging the power dynamics between whites and various minorities in America today, such that a "color-blind" approach can't solve racial issues. I assume you're in neither of these camps, so you probably mean something more along the lines of acknowledging black culture has some toxic trends which contribute to blacks' underprivileged state (which the regressive left insists is a racist position)? I'm only guessing at your meaning here. But you seem to be opposed to much of the social backlash that currently exists against people and positions viewed as "racist," and I assume you don't think we shouldn't stigmatize actual racism, so you must think the labels of racist and bigot have been over-applied by the left. I might even agree with that. Online articles trying to teach white people about "microagressions" and the like can be alright when they come from a place of earnestly trying to help whites understand how to make racial minorities feel more at ease and less alienated, but when they come in the form of condemning anyone who uses the question "So, where are you from?" in small talk as Grand Dragon of the KKK, I think it weakens the label of "racist" and makes it easier for actual racists to hide behind the cover of just being "politically incorrect." A lot of people that use terms like "cultural appropriation" and "gentrification" to explain how white people are literally Hitler are being sloppy in their reasoning, and mostly just making people think it's okay to be skeptical that they could possibly ever be racist. So I think you've assumed that I'm a member of that club, and I'm really not. Back in saner times, most of my online arguments were with those very people. But that group mostly just whines and blogs about Miley Cyrus appropriating this or that. This ethnocentrist movement wants to take over the world. I was hoping that, based on a progress-based view of racial equality, America had come far enough that it could tell the difference between telling an off-color joke to your friends (i.e. political incorrectness) and accusing Mexico of deliberately sending rapists across the border (i.e. racism). I was wrong, thus I am rethinking my assumption that racial equality has steadily improved over time and will only keep getting better. I think this is the first opinion since the "racism war" started about 20 pages back that is actually worth reading. His post is the saner and nicer version of Kwark's 40% of America is racist posts. And it's unsurprising to me that he, like everyone else on the other side of the issue, struggles with this part of Danglars' post: My sobering thought is this: what if the current campaign against out-of-fashion ideas and racial realism won't be reversed for many years? What if the zealots of today, the current victors of the culture war, won't realize how hideous their own movement has become, nor how the '60s rebellion against authority became a puritanical persecution from authority (cultural leadership brought to you by Your Moral Betters™). Scapegoating and stereotyping of Trump supporters for social ills could continue, as much as I wish it would not. It is intensely psychological and the fight in every generation is to inspire the better angels of our nature.
I'm hoping the atmosphere of moral scolds today are later regarded as a weird period of American history when people embraced racializing every issue to the detriment of true debate on the issues. When language was so bastardized and social media lynch mobs so emboldened that every political opinion was viewed by the color difference of the author & subject's skin. I look with some hope to the next generation. Today's left-leaning culture responds to criticism like a priest to sacrilege, and even young people today can see how bizarre it acts. It's far more likely that today's regress, disguised as progress, continues to win and that's a very sobering thought indeed. If by "struggles with" you mean "has trouble figuring out what he's getting at," you're absolutely right. I mean I've been puzzling over the term "racial realism" and I still can't figure out what it is supposed to mean. I would call affirmative action supporters "realists" for dealing with the reality that the races are treated differently today to the point that the same grades and test scores from two different students does not mean they're equally smart if one is white and one is black. There's good research showing that, for instance, black test takers perform significantly worse if you have them fill out demographic info immediately before a test compared to immediately after. But the term could just as easily mean something like believing in the "reality" that blacks consistently performing worse on standardized tests means they're genetically dumber. It's only by benefit of the doubt I don't read Danglars post that way, but without that interpretation, I really do struggle to identify his meaning. Can you provide a source for that? The example thats trotted out regarding girls testing is regularly debunked so I'd really like to see a source for your claim. The original test didn't even have a control group just btw. Fucking ludicrous to suggest that it's real.
Tbh these types of sociological studies aren't really my area (I'm a chemist) so I don't usually read into particular studies and their methodology so much, instead following the admittedly suspect practice of reading articles online about the literature and accepting their summaries at face value. So in terms of a source, I learned about it from this article. That article cites this for its claim - feel free to decide for yourself if its methodology is up to snuff.
Even if it's not, I believe there are plenty of other well-regarded studies which confirm the phenomenon of "stereotype threat," which causes minorities to underperform on testing, which is all I was really getting at.
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United States42014 Posts
On September 24 2016 01:13 Nyxisto wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2016 00:50 KwarK wrote:
It should not be constitutionally guaranteed that Americans are allowed to be a big potential threat to the agents of the state while simultaneously having the agents of the state be entitled to respond to that potential threat with lethal force. Something has to give there if the constitutional rights of Americans are to be protected. And I will add that the issue has somewhat been resolved in white communities where the police generally don't shoot unless the potential threat becomes an actual one. The result is a selective application of constitutional rights which has been conceded by both sides, the left because they think that he shouldn't have had a gun anyway because guns are bad and the right because they think he shouldn't have had a gun anyway because blacks are bad. It's not a left or right or black or white issue. If you arm every citizen you end up in some Hobbesian 'war of all against all' scenario. You can't have every citizen being a potential threat and at the same time demand trust. It's not possible. That's why you grant the state the monopoly of force in the first place. It's why the UK has less dead police officers in a century than the US has in a year. Even if you get rid of all racism and poverty this problem will still exist.
That misses the point. You're arguing the Second Amendment shouldn't exist in its current form. I agree with you on that but it's irrelevant to the issue. The Second Amendment does currently exist and while it currently exists it should be respected, regardless of the colour of the citizen exercising that right.
It also ties in quite neatly with Trump talking about disarming the black community.
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On September 23 2016 22:50 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 23 2016 21:18 xDaunt wrote:On September 23 2016 18:42 Acrofales wrote:On September 23 2016 17:16 ChristianS wrote:On September 23 2016 15:49 Danglars wrote:On September 23 2016 15:03 ChristianS wrote:
Jesus this thread is depressing sometimes.
The last ~24 hours of discussion have put a sobering thought into my head, and I wonder what you guys think of it. Basically, in the last 50 or so years, there's been a strong anti-racist movement in the country as a whole. Laws that discriminate against blacks became widely considered unacceptable, public figures are shunned for expressing racist ideas or using racist epithets. The implied justification was that we as a society were making a concerted effort to eliminate racism as much as possible, and drive whatever resistant strains that survived to . Considered with other historical moves towards equality (elimination of slavery, blacks joining the military, Brown v. Board, etc.), it fit nicely with an overarching narrative of racial progress.
Maybe this is just a problem with anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me those attitudes are completely different in a lot of people today. Hardened Trump supporters often try to deny that Trump is a racist, but far more frequently I see people that just don't seem to care much. They might even lean toward thinking he probably is, but it's just not that important an issue. This is really baffling to me, since for my whole life there's been a widespread cultural agreement that overt racism is one of the ugliest sides of human civilization and absolutely cannot be tolerated, but in the broad view of history, racism is absolutely the norm. Not always as bad as early American South racism, but it's always been pretty normal to distrust people with different cultural and ethnic background than you, treat them worse, value their life less than that of your family or friends or tribe members. I always figured that was just part of progress – unlike humans for most of history, we have cars and refrigerators and computers and a prevailing cultural understanding that racism is bad. It's a nice stroll through memory lane, but you make a sudden leap into modern times by contrasting the civil rights era with Trump and his supporters. Sit at the back of the bus was racism. Separate eating establishments based on race was racism. Immigration policy isn't. Political invective on several issues isn't (though abrasive speech will still cause others to bristle no matter the subject). You're right to call it anecdotal, and it's intensely subjective. You'll see the comparisons to late 1800s racism and xenophobia, others will see you as a wannabe crusader longing for a bygone era but without a real civil rights cause today. Worth noting I never said Trump's immigration policy means he's racist. I was honestly more focused on Trump himself. Being prosecuted by Nixon's Justice Department for really explicitly discriminating against black tenants in his hotels back in the 70's. That stuff by Jack O'Donnell about how when he was president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump went off about not wanting a black guy as an accountant because blacks are lazy, and he only wants Jews counting his money. Calling Mexicans rapists. Those shitty stereotypes he embraced talking to the Republican Jewish Coalition. Y'know, that stuff. But I wasn't really looking to pick a fight either. I don't really long to be a civil rights crusader. The 50's and 60's sound awful, and I'm glad I didn't have to be around for it. I honestly wish that we were having a relatively normal election between, like, Tim Kaine and Jeb Bush, and I could tune out and read the occasional headline without click on it and maybe get around to registering to vote if I had nothing better to do, but I probably never would because I wouldn't care that much who won. Instead we've got a large, disgruntled population of lower- and middle-class white people who feel that they've been wronged by the world. They think they used to have some kind of glory and power, but now their manufacturing jobs are fading away and they're losing their privileged place in the world, and they feel betrayed and unsafe and powerless. We've got a demagogue candidate who's appealing to this population by telling them that they lost their power because of Mexicans and Muslims and China. He's parading around families of people that were raped or murdered by illegal Mexicans to gin up a rage against these foreigners that are raping and murdering their wives and children. He's saying the whole world is laughing at them because they don't win any more. And he's promising them that if they support him, then by the time he's done, nobody will laugh at them again. This is not a drill, this is how real life racial persecution gets started. This is the type of movement that used to lead to pogroms and lynchings and blood libel. People get so caught up in the movement and the propaganda and the cult of personality around a charismatic leader that they stop paying attention to facts and policy, to the point that you can explain to them that the crime rate is down, not up, that they lost their manufacturing jobs to the inexorable forces of globalism and no one can bring them back, and that illegal immigrants actually commit violent crime at a lower rate than the rest of the population, but it has absolutely no bearing on how they feel. My sobering thought was this: what if we're not on an inevitable march toward progress and greater racial equality? What if the anti-racist attitudes of the last 50 years aren't a lasting cultural achievement, but just a temporary backlash against the ugly racism of the 40's and 50's? People saw how hideous that Nazi movement was, and they saw the horrible treatment of blacks in the South, and the lynching of Emmett Till, and the dogs and firehoses deployed against civil rights protesters, and for a while it became fashionable to be against racism.
But now that all that stuff isn't such recent memory, racism takes on all of the advantages that made it prevalent in human society before. Scapegoating is an easy way to feel better about your problems. Stereotyping is almost inescapable in the psychology of how humans understand the world. Many apparent virtues that people are encouraged to cultivate (e.g. loyalty, empathy) can subconsciously promote tribalism (e.g. loyalty involves favoring those you're close to over those you're not, empathy encourages greater connection to people who are more like you). Racial minorities are often small enough in number that society can get weird impressions of them simply from having too small a sample size, and once a weird (especially negative) bias gets in place, confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy effects tend to maintain or expand that bias.
I've been hoping all the bigotry of the Trump movement would be remembered by history as a weird spike of bigotry as the white American middle class came to terms with several realities it had been in denial about for years. But what if history remembers these past ~50 years as that brief period where American society was largely anti-racist? My sobering thought is this: what if the current campaign against out-of-fashion ideas and racial realism won't be reversed for many years? What if the zealots of today, the current victors of the culture war, won't realize how hideous their own movement has become, nor how the '60s rebellion against authority became a puritanical persecution from authority (cultural leadership brought to you by Your Moral Betters™). Scapegoating and stereotyping of Trump supporters for social ills could continue, as much as I wish it would not. It is intensely psychological and the fight in every generation is to inspire the better angels of our nature. I'm hoping the atmosphere of moral scolds today are later regarded as a weird period of American history when people embraced racializing every issue to the detriment of true debate on the issues. When language was so bastardized and social media lynch mobs so emboldened that every political opinion was viewed by the color difference of the author & subject's skin. I look with some hope to the next generation. Today's left-leaning culture responds to criticism like a priest to sacrilege, and even young people today can see how bizarre it acts. It's far more likely that today's regress, disguised as progress, continues to win and that's a very sobering thought indeed. Seems like you're throwing out a lot of punches at stuff I'm not sure if you're assuming I support. I'm also not sure what's meant by terms like "racial realism." It seems to denote a position which acknowledges the realities of race (about which this "regressive left" is presumably in denial), but I'm not sure what realities you think those are. A white supremacist might say they're a "racial realist" for acknowledging that white people are better than black people. An SJW might call themselves a "racial realist" for acknowledging the power dynamics between whites and various minorities in America today, such that a "color-blind" approach can't solve racial issues. I assume you're in neither of these camps, so you probably mean something more along the lines of acknowledging black culture has some toxic trends which contribute to blacks' underprivileged state (which the regressive left insists is a racist position)? I'm only guessing at your meaning here. But you seem to be opposed to much of the social backlash that currently exists against people and positions viewed as "racist," and I assume you don't think we shouldn't stigmatize actual racism, so you must think the labels of racist and bigot have been over-applied by the left. I might even agree with that. Online articles trying to teach white people about "microagressions" and the like can be alright when they come from a place of earnestly trying to help whites understand how to make racial minorities feel more at ease and less alienated, but when they come in the form of condemning anyone who uses the question "So, where are you from?" in small talk as Grand Dragon of the KKK, I think it weakens the label of "racist" and makes it easier for actual racists to hide behind the cover of just being "politically incorrect." A lot of people that use terms like "cultural appropriation" and "gentrification" to explain how white people are literally Hitler are being sloppy in their reasoning, and mostly just making people think it's okay to be skeptical that they could possibly ever be racist. So I think you've assumed that I'm a member of that club, and I'm really not. Back in saner times, most of my online arguments were with those very people. But that group mostly just whines and blogs about Miley Cyrus appropriating this or that. This ethnocentrist movement wants to take over the world. I was hoping that, based on a progress-based view of racial equality, America had come far enough that it could tell the difference between telling an off-color joke to your friends (i.e. political incorrectness) and accusing Mexico of deliberately sending rapists across the border (i.e. racism). I was wrong, thus I am rethinking my assumption that racial equality has steadily improved over time and will only keep getting better. I think this is the first opinion since the "racism war" started about 20 pages back that is actually worth reading. His post is the saner and nicer version of Kwark's 40% of America is racist posts. And it's unsurprising to me that he, like everyone else on the other side of the issue, struggles with this part of Danglars' post: My sobering thought is this: what if the current campaign against out-of-fashion ideas and racial realism won't be reversed for many years? What if the zealots of today, the current victors of the culture war, won't realize how hideous their own movement has become, nor how the '60s rebellion against authority became a puritanical persecution from authority (cultural leadership brought to you by Your Moral Betters™). Scapegoating and stereotyping of Trump supporters for social ills could continue, as much as I wish it would not. It is intensely psychological and the fight in every generation is to inspire the better angels of our nature.
I'm hoping the atmosphere of moral scolds today are later regarded as a weird period of American history when people embraced racializing every issue to the detriment of true debate on the issues. When language was so bastardized and social media lynch mobs so emboldened that every political opinion was viewed by the color difference of the author & subject's skin. I look with some hope to the next generation. Today's left-leaning culture responds to criticism like a priest to sacrilege, and even young people today can see how bizarre it acts. It's far more likely that today's regress, disguised as progress, continues to win and that's a very sobering thought indeed. If by "struggles with" you mean "has trouble figuring out what he's getting at," you're absolutely right. I mean I've been puzzling over the term "racial realism" and I still can't figure out what it is supposed to mean.
Racial realism is an idea from the alt right that there are differences between the races that should be recognized and accounted for as opposed to washing over those differences with the artificial (ie "the not real") construct of liberal/progressive egalitarianism. Depending upon how you define the alt right, different factions of the alt right reach different conclusions from this perspective, ranging from advocacy for western culture to advocacy for white nationalism.
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Stop and frisk takes illegal guns from black people. It just tends to have more guns banned in large cities to be taken away. If they had say a shotgun down the back of their pants and the binder of permits down the front they'd be fine.
How does chicago have stop and frisk when it was ruled unconstitutional. It just feels like a weird communist secret police "show me your papers" policy.
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racial realism is nothing but another term for 1930s race pseudo-science. It's a form of essentialism that's politically motivated. Variation among the human population can be accounted for without resorting to race classifications.
On September 24 2016 01:19 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2016 01:13 Nyxisto wrote:On September 24 2016 00:50 KwarK wrote:
It should not be constitutionally guaranteed that Americans are allowed to be a big potential threat to the agents of the state while simultaneously having the agents of the state be entitled to respond to that potential threat with lethal force. Something has to give there if the constitutional rights of Americans are to be protected. And I will add that the issue has somewhat been resolved in white communities where the police generally don't shoot unless the potential threat becomes an actual one. The result is a selective application of constitutional rights which has been conceded by both sides, the left because they think that he shouldn't have had a gun anyway because guns are bad and the right because they think he shouldn't have had a gun anyway because blacks are bad. It's not a left or right or black or white issue. If you arm every citizen you end up in some Hobbesian 'war of all against all' scenario. You can't have every citizen being a potential threat and at the same time demand trust. It's not possible. That's why you grant the state the monopoly of force in the first place. It's why the UK has less dead police officers in a century than the US has in a year. Even if you get rid of all racism and poverty this problem will still exist. That misses the point. You're arguing the Second Amendment shouldn't exist in its current form. I agree with you on that but it's irrelevant to the issue. The Second Amendment does currently exist and while it currently exists it should be respected, regardless of the colour of the citizen exercising that right. It also ties in quite neatly with Trump talking about disarming the black community.
I agree obviously that every law that exists should be applied equally. But it's just very hard to to uphold issues of liberty in an atmosphere that is so poisoned by violence. It is almost impossible when it comes to terrorism, which is a much lesser threat even in terms of dead and injured than everyday violence.
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United States42014 Posts
On September 24 2016 01:26 Nyxisto wrote:
racial realism is nothing but another term for 1930s race pseudo-science. It's a form of essentialism that's politically motivated. Variation among the human population can be accounted for without resorting to race classifications.
Pretty much. We saw the same shit with gender. Women made shitty scientists and inventors right up until the point where we started educating them at which point they became fine at it (although gender biased teaching is still an observable phenomenon in terms of teacher time allocation and expectations). The outcome was only linked to the premise by a complete refusal to account for external factors.
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On September 24 2016 01:32 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2016 01:26 Nyxisto wrote:
racial realism is nothing but another term for 1930s race pseudo-science. It's a form of essentialism that's politically motivated. Variation among the human population can be accounted for without resorting to race classifications. Pretty much. We saw the same shit with gender. Women made shitty scientists and inventors right up until the point where we started educating them at which point they became fine at it (although gender biased teaching is still an observable phenomenon in terms of teacher time allocation and expectations). The outcome was only linked to the premise by a complete refusal to account for external factors.
Also easy to note that "racial realism" is complete B.S. since genetic research has pretty conclusively shown that race doesn't actually have a genetic basis.
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EPT
