US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9804

On January 30 2018 23:33 ShoCkeyy wrote:
I just want this investigation to be over so I can know if we're turning into Russia, or Trump is being removed.

On January 30 2018 20:59 mustaju wrote:
I recently came across this in an Estonian culture publication. It seems to provide a quite thorough counter-argument to the claim that the protests at the US universities regarding controversial speakers is a major issue. It seems rather well-sourced as well. It did not address the violence accompanying some events however, but since this seems to come up so often, maybe it is interesting to other people too. I did not see it posted, so apologies if it's spam.
Source

On January 31 2018 01:30 Mohdoo wrote:
I don't understand how Trump ignoring a 98-2 senate vote isn't an enormous red flag. How in the world are republicans not suddenly super sketched out?

ATLANTA—From a religious-freedom bill to a proposed English-only constitutional amendment, Georgia politicians and advocates are invoking Amazon’s name.

The prospect of luring the retailer here is being used as political ammunition, notwithstanding that Amazon.com Inc. is months away from picking among Atlanta and 19 other finalists for the location of its second headquarters.

Jeff Graham, who runs the state’s leading gay-rights organization, Georgia Equality, said he mentions the prospect of losing the online-shopping giant to rally opposition to a religious-freedom bill he considers discriminatory.

“Amazon has really upped the ante,” Mr. Graham said.

...

In December, Republican state Sen. Marty Harbin, a leading backer of the bill, posted a video on YouTube titled “On Amazon and RFRA,” referring to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

In the video, he said if Amazon decided not to come to Georgia, it would be because it didn’t make financial sense, not because of passage of the law. “Amazon will accept RFRA whether they like it or not,” he said.

It is difficult to divine how state legislation will influence Amazon’s decision. A person familiar with the matter said Amazon will measure metro areas’ inclusiveness, and the consideration or passage of such legislation will be a factor in its decision-making.

Amazon, which has closely guarded its site-selection process, declined to comment on how heavily such legislation might weigh on its choice.

In its pitch in September to cities seeking to draw its promised 50,000 jobs and $5 billion of investment, Amazon said it sought “the presence and support of a diverse population, excellent institutes of higher education, local government structure and elected officials eager and willing to work with the company.”
Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has been a supporter of gay rights, and Amazon has said any city it picks must be a “compatible cultural and community environment.”

Several states on Amazon’s shortlist, including Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida, have passed religious-liberties legislation. Opponents of Georgia’s religious freedom bill, however, point out that many states, including Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida, also have civil-rights statutes that explicitly protect gay people, while Georgia doesn’t.

Opponents of several Georgia bills dealing with immigration, including a state Senate resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to make English Georgia’s official language, have labeled the proposals “Adios Amazon” bills. A state Senate committee favorably recommended the resolution about the English language to the full Senate last week.

...

On January 31 2018 00:26 LegalLord wrote:

Hopefully both.


The thesis of this piece seems to be that it’s not really just universities, it’s a more general trend towards silencing undesirable speech that you could find among the larger population. That’s a reasonable assertion, especially since it’s well-sourced. And it’s also a good observation that not all students are created equal, and that many of them are perfectly reasonable individuals. The place where this fails is in the institutional support for that “snowflake mentality” that our conservative fanbase talks about. In my personal experience, while student bases can be diverse enough by virtue of the fact that people aren’t all the same, the administration of universities are strongly pressured to cater towards the lowest common denominator, i.e. to go out of the way to try to please the most easily offended people in the student population. I suppose it’s something of a liability issue, and also something of a PR issue, but the aggregate results are really stupid.

Anecdotally, I’ve been part of a university faculty in the past, for a university not particularly known for its ideological bent or for having a particularly skewed student base. I still had to learn about and humor all the stuff that seems like it would come out of a conservative circlejerk about culture war: rape culture, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, basically everything you do is sexual harassment, so on and so forth. To me at least, that gives credence to the conservative narrative because I’ve seen institutional support for that brand of stupidity.

On January 31 2018 02:00 Stratos_speAr wrote:


Let's pause for a moment to remember that conservatives have absolutely no right to cry about "Snowflake" mentalities. There are numerous topics where conservatives absolutely lose their fucking minds and go full-blown snowflake. The hypocrisy is palpable.