EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 6649
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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. | ||
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Deleted User 173346
16169 Posts
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{CC}StealthBlue
United States41117 Posts
SAN FRANCISCO ― One of President Donald Trump’s first major executive actions on immigration policy is facing massive political blowback and will almost certainly crash and burn under the Constitution once courts begin to scrutinize the fine print. During a visit to the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order aimed at strong-arming so-called “sanctuary cities” into cooperating fully with his efforts to ramp up deportations. Threatening loss of federal funding and using shaming tactics for localities that refuse to comply, the order is styled as a call to obey existing immigration laws ― even though immigration experts and civil liberties groups are doubtful Trump even has the constitutional authority to enforce it. Independent of the ultimate legality of the executive order, politicians from those sanctuary cities say they aren’t budging, and legal advocacy groups are gearing up for the coming legal fight. The president is “in for one hell of a fight,” California state Sen. Scott Weiner (D), who represents San Francisco, said in a statement. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D) said his city “will not retreat one inch” from its policy against holding undocumented immigrants it otherwise would not hold based on requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said his city “will not be intimidated by federal dollars and ... will not be intimidated by the authoritative message from this administration.” San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee (D) said “nothing has changed” in his city, noting the lack of specifics in Trump’s order. “We are going to fight this, and cities and states around the country are going to fight this,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said at a press conference Wednesday. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) already began hinting at a legal challenge, releasing a statement that Trump lacks the constitutional authority for his executive order and that he will do “everything in [his] power” to push back if the president does not rescind it. Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) also warned of potential legal challenges to come, saying in a statement that the order “raises significant legal issues that my office will be investigating closely to protect the constitutional and human rights of the people of our state.” There’s no exact definition of “sanctuary city.” Places like San Francisco and New York use the term broadly to refer to their immigrant-friendly policies, but more generally the term is applied to cities and counties that do not reflexively honor all of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s requests for cooperation. Many of these localities do work with ICE to detain and hand over immigrants suspected or convicted of serious crimes, but they often release low-priority immigrants requested by ICE if they have no other reason to hold them. Source | ||
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ChristianS
United States3304 Posts
On January 26 2017 14:40 xDaunt wrote: I'd rather liken it to the medicinal effects of drinking tea or the efficacy of building walls. Considering people have thought a lot of things over the millenia about what tea did (most of them wrong), I wonder what you mean by this. Pray tell, what exactly do you think the medicinal effects of tea are? | ||
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sharkie
Austria18707 Posts
http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-gigapixel/ What is fake news now? | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States24142 Posts
If it isn't real, it's pretty much how I imagined it. | ||
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RealityIsKing
613 Posts
On January 26 2017 14:42 plasmidghost wrote: Holy shit Infowars has press credentials now Finally! They've been debunking Leftiest fake news for way too long. | ||
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CatharsisUT
United States487 Posts
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Falling
Canada11583 Posts
On January 26 2017 15:22 RealityIsKing wrote: Finally! They've been debunking Leftiest fake news for way too long. Yeah! Troops are out in force for Y2K! They are shutting down nuclear power plants. Nuclear missiles have been launched. Mainstream media is ignoring the New World Order take over during the Y2K! 9/11 was an inside job! Bohemian Grove! Devil worshiping pedophiles! What a guy, a lover of truth. Buy your super male vitality pills, your nascent iodine, your Living Defence here! What a man of integrity! For only 895.95, you can buy 6 months of food supplies. Throw in another 177, and we'll throw in a water filtration system! Alex's one stop shop for all you hyper-ventilating survivalists, waiting with baited breath for the Illuminati to take over... for the last two decades! But don't worry, They are still just about to take over! So hang in there and buy, buy, buy because if we don't have it, you don't want it! | ||
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Slaughter
United States20255 Posts
On January 26 2017 14:18 LegalLord wrote: Speaking of Andrew Jackson, I wonder if Trump is going to reverse that absurd idea to remove him from the $20. Would be one of the places he could do some good, that's for sure. Why is it absurd? Jackson was a prick and he also hated paper money anyway. He is a good candidate as any if you want to change things up and put a new person on a bill. | ||
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Falling
Canada11583 Posts
On January 26 2017 15:56 Slaughter wrote: Why is it absurd? Jackson was a prick and he also hated paper money anyway. He is a good candidate as any if you want to change things up and put a new person on a bill. Whereas we decided to knock both our war-time prime-ministers off our money  | ||
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RealityIsKing
613 Posts
On January 26 2017 15:51 Falling wrote: Yeah! Troops are out in force for Y2K! They are shutting down nuclear power plants. Nuclear missiles have been launched. Mainstream media is ignoring the New World Order take over during the Y2K! 9/11 was an inside job! Bohemian Grove! Devil worshiping pedophiles! What a guy, a lover of truth. Buy your super male vitality pills, your nascent iodine, your Living Defence here! What a man of integrity! For only 895.95, you can buy 6 months of food supplies. Throw in another 177, and we'll throw in a water filtration system! Alex's one stop shop for all you hyper-ventilating survivalists, waiting with baited breath for the Illuminati to take over... for the last two decades! But don't worry, They are still just about to take over! So hang in there and buy, buy, buy because if we don't have it, you don't want it! That was him before, but during the election, Alex had a calling. And it has called upon his duty to bring the truth to the American public by debunking the Leftiest media's blatant bias against President Trump. | ||
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TheYango
United States47024 Posts
On January 26 2017 14:40 xDaunt wrote: I'd rather liken it to the medicinal effects of drinking tea And yet no physician would ever give you a prescription for tea, even though in a non-professional capacity they might recommend it's use. In the same vein, I think the discussion over whether the US Government/Military should be using torture are somewhat missing what I think is the point. In fact, they probably still are on some level anyway, regardless of what the president does and doesn't say. What matters is that it's not really to the benefit of the US Government in any way to support the use of torture in any official capacity. Even though off the books it might still be used to an extent where the government can maintain plausible deniability--it doesn't look good for anyone for the president to come out and say it works and should be used. The only way that makes sense is if you expect torture to be used so frequently that the government cannot maintain plausible deniability. If you only expect it to be infrequently used in specific instances, then you'd be better off lying to the public/the world and saying that you don't condone the use of torture, brushing off the few times you get caught doing it as isolated instances where individuals went too far outside of the government's discretion. | ||
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Falling
Canada11583 Posts
On January 26 2017 16:31 RealityIsKing wrote: That was him before, but during the election, Alex had a calling. And it has called upon his duty to bring the truth to the American public by debunking the Leftiest media's blatant bias against President Trump. I emphasized his Y2K stuff over 9/11 very deliberately; these guys have an uncanny way of remaking themselves and burying their crazy lies and conspiracies while latching on to their next set of wild ideas. But in the end they are still the same fear merchants, but this time emphasizing Jihadis rather than the Illuminati. (Although I'm sure it fits into the Grand Unified Theory of Conspiracies somehow.) It's been fascinating seeing some very old and familiar faces of the old Truther movements remake themselves to hop on the Trump Train. Mark Dice of The Resistance is back, for instance, remade as a warrior against PC and fake news. You'll have to forgive me chuckling at these people concerned about fake news, when I've seen the lies they've been peddling these last ten years. It's Robert Tilton returned to sell holy water to widows on welfare. It's Harold Camping or Jack Van Impe returned for their fourth prediction of the Second Coming of Christ. You may wait on the hill top for Alex Jones' 45th failed prediction (he's had that many between 2008-2010 alone), but me, I'll find a better prophet, a better critic, a better source. edilt Also you are wrong that Jones has changed in any way. He sees Trump as purging the CIA, finding moles etc. What he talking about is Trump is cleaning out the evil New World Order guys: "filth" "trash" "god, we hate you". It's the same drill, different vehicle. | ||
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Biff The Understudy
France8146 Posts
On January 26 2017 09:41 Thieving Magpie wrote: If research has proof that Practice A makes the world better compared to Practice B--then would you trust your feelings of Practice A or the research done on Practice A? I *personally* don't believe torture is a useful tool for damn near anything. But I also understand that people will always follow the path that gives them the most positives over the ones with negatives. This usually means that light amounts of negative reinforcement can be useful (Yelling at a kid to not touch hot things, punching a nazi who toyed with the idea of black genocide, etc...) But torture, the way we discuss it as a political tool, usually happens when the person being tortured has too much too lose for telling the truth--and is often tortured by people who don't actually want the truth, but reinforcement for their already formed conclusions. As such--torture does not make sense to me. *However* if science shows that it is effective--me feeling icky about it should not be a reason not to follow through with it. It's not science, it's morals. We agree, torture is practically a bad idea. It doesn't work. But what if it did? You talk of positive outcome, but what about principles, moral, or simply being civilized. You compare it to yelling to a kid. Let's take it the other way purely for the sake of the argument: if you could greatly reduce crime by making concentration camps, Auschwitz style, would you go for it? Of course not. You are not a monster. Or if I told you that if you torture and cut to death bit by bit the innocent 3 yo next door to save 15 people, you still wouldn't do it, because you are (i assume) a good man, and this is way beyond certain principles you would follow no matter what. The outcome would be "good" but this is nit how you would weight the decision. Yes, torture is ineffective. But that's beyond the point. We don't torture people because we would get tarnushed by doing so, because it's morally disgusting. | ||
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Acrofales
Spain18375 Posts
On January 26 2017 12:29 xDaunt wrote: Considering that torture has been employed as a tool of interrogation for millennia, I think that it is pretty safe to say that torture has some degree of efficacy. Nevermind the reports of various officers saying that torture worked on various Al Qaeda figures. How is "it was done for millennia" an effective argument if you don't know the purpose it was used for. Its most common use was not as an information extraction tool, but a confession extraction tool. The Spanish Inquisition wanted ppl to confess they were heretics before being burned. Far neater that way. Same for KGB agents finding "American spies", Romans finding Christians, or any feudal lords ever finding "conspirators". If you want a confession, it's great. It is proven to work. I don't think you want a confession. You want information. Torture has no proven efficacy in that department. Especially not based on the millennia it was used previously. E: let me just add that "great that you confessed, now name 5 coconspirators" did not lead to "truthful intelligence", because those 5 coconspirators also confessed... because let's face it: if you torture me, I'll be a KGB spy, a filthy Jihadi, or whatever else you want me to be, and will rat out my 5 best friends, just oh god, please not the thumbscrews again, aaaaaaaaaaaagh | ||
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farvacola
United States18866 Posts
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States46223 Posts
NASA launches unofficial Twitter account in defiance of Donald Trump You can count NASA as the third federal agency in the past twenty-four hours to defy Donald Trump by launching unofficial non-government Twitter accounts which Trump can’t control or sensor. First it was the National Park Service, which went rogue on Twitter after Trump forced deletions of factual tweets he didn’t like. Then the EPA went rogue earlier today. And now NASA has launched its own rogue Twitter account in order to make sure its truths are heard against Trump’s will. The rogue Twitter account in question, which is literally called @RogueNASA, has only existed for five hours and has already gained a significant popular following. It started off by tweeting “We cannot allow Mr. Trump to silence the scientific community. We need peer-reviewed, evidence-based research MORE THAN EVER now,” while adding “How sad is it that government employees have to create rogue Twitter accounts just to communicate FACTS to the American public?” The account has since been tweeting the kinds of scientific facts and climate change data which Trump is most likely to want censored — and there’s not a thing he can do about it. Because the identities of the NASA employees running @RogueNASA Twitter account are unknown, there is no way for Donald Trump to discipline them or fire them over it. And he can’t get the account forcibly shut down, because the NASA employees aren’t doing anything that would violate Twitter’s terms of service. In other words, Trump’s Twitter shenanigans have officially backfired. The rogue NASA account has also been retweeting climate change data originally tweeted by Congressman Mark Takano, who has stated that he’s doing so specifically because Trump is trying to keep the data quashed. If you want to follow the unofficial NASA Twitter account, which now has more than forty thousand followers, you can find it here. https://www.palmerreport.com/news/nasa-launches-unofficial-twitter-account-in-defiance-of-donald-trump/1180/ | ||
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Acrofales
Spain18375 Posts
On January 26 2017 17:40 Biff The Understudy wrote: It's not science, it's morals. We agree, torture is practically a bad idea. It doesn't work. But what if it did? You talk of positive outcome, but what about principles, moral, or simply being civilized. You compare it to yelling to a kid. Let's take it the other way purely for the sake of the argument: if you could greatly reduce crime by making concentration camps, Auschwitz style, would you go for it? Of course not. You are not a monster. Or if I told you that if you torture and cut to death bit by bit the innocent 3 yo next door to save 15 people, you still wouldn't do it, because you are (i assume) a good man, and this is way beyond certain principles you would follow no matter what. The outcome would be "good" but this is nit how you would weight the decision. Yes, torture is ineffective. But that's beyond the point. We don't torture people because we would get tarnushed by doing so, because it's morally disgusting. Well, if we get right down to the nitty gritty details, our moral frameworks are woefully inept at explaining a) what we do, or even b) what we should do. I think everyone here by now has gone through the trolley problem and found that what their intuition says is "right" does not correspond to the Golden Rule, or the utility theory of ethics. Not only that, but even if you go with what you believe about your preferred philosophy of ethics, you still end up with some paradoxical shit. One of the problems is that most theories of ethics deal with complete information: if you torture the fat man, he will with 100% certainty reveal the position of the bomb. Whereas in reality, we don't have comic book bad guys. We have someone we think might be involved, but claims he isn't, who might know the details of a terrorist plot, which we have not even confirmed actually exists, and *that* guy is refusing to cooperate with the police. Moreover, you might be able to foil that terrorist plot in any one of a million other ways that do not involve torture. So, I disagree with the basic premise of the thought experiment in the trolley problem (as should you: it's dumb), but it does point out some very real problems in our ethical theories: we are fucking terrible at ethics. So while I agree that torture is a despiccable practice, stating something is categorically wrong is too black and white. Lets be pragmatic. If the Joker steps into Gotham police station and states that he has hidden a dirty bomb somewhere in the city and it will explode in 3 hours, torture the fucker to get the location out of him. That doesn't make torture a less disgusting practice, it's just better than a nuke going off in your city. However, in very very very very very very very nearly all real situations, anybody who steps into an actual (not Gotham) police station claiming to have hidden a bomb in the city, is a delusional lunatic and there is no bomb anywhere, so torture is (1) pointless and (2) cruel. And I don't trust the CIA/NSA/FBI/Police/Army to be able to tell the difference between a Joker-like criminal mastermind, and a raving lunatic claiming to be the Joker. So lets not make any laws that allow torture under any circumstances. | ||
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Biff The Understudy
France8146 Posts
On January 26 2017 20:38 Acrofales wrote: Well, if we get right down to the nitty gritty details, our moral frameworks are woefully inept at explaining a) what we do, or even b) what we should do. I think everyone here by now has gone through the trolley problem and found that what their intuition says is "right" does not correspond to the Golden Rule, or the utility theory of ethics. Not only that, but even if you go with what you believe about your preferred philosophy of ethics, you still end up with some paradoxical shit. One of the problems is that most theories of ethics deal with complete information: if you torture the fat man, he will with 100% certainty reveal the position of the bomb. Whereas in reality, we don't have comic book bad guys. We have someone we think might be involved, but claims he isn't, who might know the details of a terrorist plot, which we have not even confirmed actually exists, and *that* guy is refusing to cooperate with the police. Moreover, you might be able to foil that terrorist plot in any one of a million other ways that do not involve torture. So, I disagree with the basic premise of the thought experiment in the trolley problem (as should you: it's dumb), but it does point out some very real problems in our ethical theories: we are fucking terrible at ethics. So while I agree that torture is a despiccable practice, stating something is categorically wrong is too black and white. Lets be pragmatic. If the Joker steps into Gotham police station and states that he has hidden a dirty bomb somewhere in the city and it will explode in 3 hours, torture the fucker to get the location out of him. That doesn't make torture a less disgusting practice, it's just better than a nuke going off in your city. However, in very very very very very very very nearly all real situations, anybody who steps into an actual (not Gotham) police station claiming to have hidden a bomb in the city, is a delusional lunatic and there is no bomb anywhere, so torture is (1) pointless and (2) cruel. And I don't trust the CIA/NSA/FBI/Police/Army to be able to tell the difference between a Joker-like criminal mastermind, and a raving lunatic claiming to be the Joker. So lets not make any laws that allow torture under any circumstances. I am all for looking into ethic and moral philosophy; in fact it's what interested me the most when i took a degree at the unversity. And I know it's horribly tricky and paradoxical. But I don't think it's that complicated in a case like that. There are red lines you don't go over, because we are not scumbags, because we are proud of being civilized, because we have decency and humanity. And no theoretical situation that never happens would change any of that. And like a surprising amount of other things (murdering children etc...), it is, imo, very black and white. We don't do it, period. I really believe that to even consider torture as a good idea, one has to be very deeply morally bankrupted. | ||
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farvacola
United States18866 Posts
Of course, messianic religions have been channeling problematic rules through personage and acts for hundreds of years, so none of that ended up being very ground-breaking. For what it's worth, I think it can be shown that "what would Jesus do" is actually a pretty sound axiom for moral action, but only if you shave away the bulk of what is tacked onto it by mainstream Christianity  Oh, and because this is somehow not well understood in my supposedly Christian nation, Jesus would not approve of torture. lol, how the fuck do I even have to say that? | ||
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