US Politics Mega-thread - Page 720

On December 17 2013 01:35 DoubleReed wrote:


Nah, you can easily find articles on this. Like this one on how our "right to counsel" has been systematically undermined in the last 50 years. It led me to this article, which has more about what we can do, and states the following:

This report gives real-life examples of innovative holistic defense practices that defender offices
across the country have implemented in the past year.

Some of the practices produce objectively verifiable measures of success over a relatively short time
period. Results from these practices could be used to seek greater funding for expanded versions of
successful projects. Even where the practices do not produce objectively verifiable results, they are
not merely cosmetic. They are intended to have positive consequences for the offices and attorneys
implementing them, from improved court performance, to better morale among staff and leadership

The Brennan Center developed the Ten Principles of Community-Oriented Defense in partnership
with leaders of the Community-Oriented Defense movement in order to provide a blueprint that
defenders can use to strengthen their client-service programs and improve policies affecting clients’
communities. This Start Now report uses the COD Ten Principles as a structure to present the
innovative work that Network members have been involved in over the past year, so that it can be
successfully replicated in districts throughout the country

Despite the increasingly severe fiscal constraints on their offices, public defenders usually provide representation that is at least as competent as that provided by private defense attorneys. This was demon­strated by a 1992 study conducted by the National Center for State Courts entitled, “Indigent Defenders Get the Job Done and Done Well.” The study concluded that P.D.s and private counsel achieve approximately equal results. For example, in the nine counties surveyed in the study, 76% of public defender clients were convicted, compared to 74% of private counsel clients.

Additionally, public defender jobs tend to be so competitive that P.D. offices can select highly qualified attorneys. True, many P.D.s stay for a few years, gain intensive experience, and then leave for the supposedly greener pastures of private practice. However, most public defender offices offer excellent training programs, so that even recently arrived P.D.s can rapidly build expertise. In some large metropolitan areas (in California and New York, for example), the Public Defender offices are highly respected, giving their clients representation that only a highly-experienced (and expensive) private attorney could match.

On December 17 2013 08:36 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Are you seriously making the argument that rich people and poor people are treated the same by the american legal system?

I mean, I'm not saying that the judges normally look at someone and goes "rich!" or "poor!" and then lets that influence his decision making, but you seem to entirely disregard the fact that the wealthier you are the better legal representation you get. You could at least say that you don't perceive it as a problem, that the wealthy have earned this privilege through working hard to attain their wealth or whatnot, but don't pretend like it's not a reality..

On December 17 2013 04:38 Acrofales wrote:
I like how stealthblue spams new news articles when the discussion gets stale! :D

A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records likely violates the Constitution, in a major setback for the controversial spy agency.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon granted a preliminary injunction sought by plaintiffs Larry Klayman and Charles Strange. However, he also stayed his decision "pending appeal," giving the U.S. government time to fight the decision over the next several months.

The judge wrote that he expects the government to "prepare itself to comply with this order when, and if, it is upheld."

The ruling was the first major legal defeat for the NSA since former contractor Edward Snowden began exposing secrets about the NSA's data collection over the summer.

"We've seen the opinion and are studying it," the Justice Department said in a brief statement after the decision. "We believe the program is constitutional as previous judges have found. We have no further comment at this time."

It’s a Man’s World, And It Always Will Be
By: Camille Paglia

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America, and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamor. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.

It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling, or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S. is, despite their putative leftism, an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused, clerical and managerial skills of the upper-middle-class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity. Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive.

But the triumphalism among some, such as Hanna Rosin in her book, “The End of Men,” about women’s gains seems startlingly premature, such as when Rosin says of the sagging fortunes of today’s working-class couples that they and we had “reached the end of a hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back.” This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history’s far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role—but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

On December 17 2013 09:59 xDaunt wrote:
Oh boy, would I love to witness the shitstorm that this must be creating in feminist circles:



Source.

I don't agree with Paglia on much, but I do love reading her because 1) she has a very interesting style, and 2) she's ruthlessly intellectually honest.

Are you seriously making the argument that rich people and poor people are treated the same by the american legal system?

but you seem to entirely disregard the fact that the wealthier you are the better legal representation you get.

You could at least say that you don't perceive it as a problem, that the wealthy have earned this privilege through working hard to attain their wealth or whatnot, but don't pretend like it's not a reality..

On December 17 2013 10:07 KwarK wrote:
What utter rot. Of course men do a lot, we make up half the world's population. I don't think many feminists are suggesting that men are dispensable. Claiming that women should give men credit for the world they've created is a very silly idea, it was created by men because women were systematically excluded from participation. Men didn't go out of their way to create a wonderful world so women didn't have to. People created the current world and the reason men are the lions share of key historical figures is because those men marginalised women who could otherwise have also been influential. It's like saying black people should be grateful that white men voted to abolish slavery on their behalf while overlooking the fact that the reason no black senators fought against slavery was that they were too busy picking cotton.

On December 17 2013 10:22 DeepElemBlues wrote:


You've not supported the argument that they do not, at all. Other than appealing to what is supposed to be "obvious."

And this country has almost 4 million square miles and more than 300 million people. You can go to every jurisdiction in this country and find rich people who've gotten off because of their influence, you can find poor people who have gotten off because there are rich and powerful organizations in this country that have dedicated themselves either partially or wholly to providing services to the poor, you can find people who aren't rich or poor who got off because they or family members have personal connections that have nothing to do with wealth.



Simply not true. You just think it's obvious so it must be true. The wealthy can afford more expensive representation, no guarantee that it is better.



You're pretending that it is a reality while presenting no evidence whatsoever, at any point in time, to show that it actually is a reality.

Sorry, but the "obvious" negative stereotypes about "the rich" and the interactions between them and society that are apparently scientific laws on the internet are not necessarily so in the real world.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by white men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a white man's epic, in which black guys have found a productive role—but black men were not its author. Surely, modern black men are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

On December 17 2013 10:49 Nyxisto wrote:
@xDaunt:

take your text, swap "women" with "black men", swap "keeping the children save" with "harvest cotton" get in your time machine and publish that article in the 19th century.



This works surprisingly well

It’s a Man’s World, And It Always Will Be
By: Camille Paglia

If men are obsolete, then “black men” will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where “black men” will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young “black men”, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then “black men” will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, “black men” will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as “black men”.

From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America, and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional “black men” seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamor. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.

It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against “black men”. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling, or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of “black men” but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected “black men”, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for “picking cotton”. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated “black men” from daily drudgery.

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S. is, despite their putative leftism, an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused, clerical and managerial skills of the upper-middle-class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity. Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which “black men”, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive.

But the triumphalism among some, such as Hanna Rosin in her book, “The End of Men,” about “black men’s” gains seems startlingly premature, such as when Rosin says of the sagging fortunes of today’s working-class couples that they and we had “reached the end of a hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back.” This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history’s far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most “black men” and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered, and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which “black men: have found a productive role—but “black men” were not its author. Surely, modern “black men” are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

On December 17 2013 10:41 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Doesn't capitalistic principles dictate that there has to be a difference in lawyer ability for there to be a difference in lawyer pricing? Or is it all marketability?

I honestly don't think this is a situation where presenting "evidence" to back up an argument is or should be necessary, and if it is to you, then I think we are too far separated from one another for any discussion we have to be productive. Much like how if this were a global warming debate, I could understand the point of view that emission restrictions is a bad way of dealing and that we must rather spend money on investing in how to deal with climate change than try to stop it from happening, and that could be a healthy argument, but I don't want to spend time proving climate change. Expensive private education is better than inexpensive or public education. Expensive private healthcare is better than inexpensive or public healthcare. Expensive lawyers are better than inexpensive or public lawyers.

On December 17 2013 10:41 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Doesn't capitalistic principles dictate that there has to be a difference in lawyer ability for there to be a difference in lawyer pricing? Or is it all marketability?

I honestly don't think this is a situation where presenting "evidence" to back up an argument is or should be necessary, and if it is to you, then I think we are too far separated from one another for any discussion we have to be productive. Much like how if this were a global warming debate, I could understand the point of view that emission restrictions is a bad way of dealing and that we must rather spend money on investing in how to deal with climate change than try to stop it from happening, and that could be a healthy argument, but I don't want to spend time proving climate change. Expensive private education is better than inexpensive or public education. Expensive private healthcare is better than inexpensive or public healthcare. Expensive lawyers are better than inexpensive or public lawyers.

On December 17 2013 09:59 xDaunt wrote:
Oh boy, would I love to witness the shitstorm that this must be creating in feminist circles:



Source.

I don't agree with Paglia on much, but I do love reading her because 1) she has a very interesting style, and 2) she's ruthlessly intellectually honest.

It’s time to put my baby-boom generation out to pasture! We’ve had our day and managed to muck up a hell of a lot. It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party’s best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished — beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband?

But the real scandal was how atrocious Cyrus’ performance was in artistic terms. She was clumsy, flat-footed and cringingly unsexy, an effect heightened by her manic grin.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

On December 17 2013 11:31 farvacola wrote:

The wealthy have access to the best, private healthcare in the US. The healthcare quality ceiling here is a wonderful and expensive piece of buttressing, but what goes on beneath it is another story. Don't be coy.

On December 17 2013 10:07 KwarK wrote:
What utter rot. Of course men do a lot, we make up half the world's population. I don't think many feminists are suggesting that men are dispensable. Claiming that women should give men credit for the world they've created is a very silly idea, it was created by men because women were systematically excluded from participation. Men didn't go out of their way to create a wonderful world so women didn't have to. People created the current world and the reason men are the lions share of key historical figures is because those men marginalised women who could otherwise have also been influential. It's like saying black people should be grateful that white men voted to abolish slavery on their behalf while overlooking the fact that the reason no black senators fought against slavery was that they were too busy picking cotton.

On December 17 2013 11:26 Danglars wrote:

I saw that too. Paglia has an interesting ability to hit every odd pitch out of the ballpark. The two most recent articles that stick out in my mind were views on Hillary 2016

and her miley cyrus gems


I had always thought that there's only so much Jezebel and Slate drivel about that an intellectually honest feminist can stand. Decrying alleged patriarchal oppression 99% of the time, cheering successes and achievements for the feminist movement and women in society 1% of the time. Paglia comes in to say what some of us have been thinking, "modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due." And can you imagine any feminist with street cred having the nerve to say, "there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive?" The saner feminists might have to adopt another label, as so much tarnishing has been done to the current one.


Incredible. You sure this isn't some sexist, bigoted man or a "kept woman" writing this? The cat's out of the bag about modern society denigrating masculinity and manhood. That well-educated woman that spent her 20s getting that degree and climbing the corporate ladder looks around and finds boys, not men.

Maybe on this gaming forum, the closest anyone will get to the modern face of feminism was Anita Sarkeesian's Damsel in Distress Series (Women in Video Games) (or some of the backlash against it). Maybe you even read about how zero-cost access to birth control figured into the Virginia's governor race. Regardless, it's heartening to see one well-spoken feminist daring to take positions that her movement has come to call sexist and bigoted. One woman to speak out at the very overt "stereotyping, belittling, or demonizing men" that's gone on amidst the cries that few feminists really do that.