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Northern Ireland24946 Posts
On January 25 2025 05:20 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2025 04:56 Acrofales wrote:On January 25 2025 04:45 BlackJack wrote:On January 24 2025 23:46 Dan HH wrote:On January 24 2025 23:28 Zambrah wrote:
Anyone else remember when the Republican boogieman was CRT? Crazy how they switch boogie men so quickly and so thoroughly I had completely forgotten about it, haven't seen the term mentioned in ages. It is crazy that the seemingly most pressing issues for our species are invisible non-factors once they just stop agitating about them. I think you have this backwards Why? What is TRC? haha  Remember BLM? Remember when everyone was posting a black screen to their instagram feed and ranting about a new black person that had been killed by police every week? Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner. Every week someone new. It's been a while since a new name has been added to that list. Did police just stop killing black people? Google tells me they killed more black people than ever last year. So I guess that's not the case. More like the issue is just no longer en vogue. It's no longer on the front page of the newspapers and on the 24 hour news networks. With it went the obsession of pushing weird race based teachings in school. Robin DeAngelo, Ibrham X Kendi are no longer making the rounds on talk shows. So the moral panic over "CRT" went away because "CRT" went away. (I put that word in quotations because inevitably someone will come in and say "well actually... that's not what CRT is") What about COVID? Did people stop dying from COVID? Certainly less but still a lot of people die. Still lives could be saved by encouraging or coercing people to get vaccinated or wear a mask or socially distance. But nobody does that either. All the little syringe emojis disappeared from the twitter bios. All the people that wanted to mandate COVID vaccines on schoolchildren so they don't go home and hug their grandma are pretty closed lip now. I guess we've reached an acceptable level of dead grandmas for them. Even the gender obsession will blow over soon enough. Gender dysphoria will still exist, trans people will still exist. We just won't be in a place where we feel compelled to tell children that the doctor just took a guess as to whether you were a boy or a girl and we don't know for sure and also there's 47 different genders you can choose from and your pronouns are whatever you want them to be. The issue will no longer be en vogue. I'm already starting to see the "my pronouns are..." disappear from work emails. Even AOC took them off her twitter bio and she's probably the most socially conscious congressperson. In 5-10 years the "my pronouns are..." emails will be no more prevalent than the last of the faded paint on the ground of a queue telling us 2 meters distance. A remnant of times passed. Then you can come back to this thread and say "remember when conservatives had a moral panic over gender issues." But don't worry, I'm sure there will be something new for progressives to progress about.
The ‘gender obsession’ would have blown over moons ago with a combination of ‘gender dysphoria is real’ and ‘ok let’s treat those people with dignity’, which evidently hasn’t been the case.
The ‘there are 46 genders’ folks talk more than their fair share of shite but there’s no legislative agenda to recognise them is there?
Hell I think listing preferred pronouns is pretty fucking lame, does it impact my life one iota though?
These things seem to bother you more than a President trying to legally erase the legitimacy of trans people, pardoning folks attempting coups and all that other good stuff. And if that isn’t the case well it’s certainly the impression you give.
Have you considered applying your consistent devil’s advocacy to any of that? If one is just a contrarian for the craic, then as the pendulum swings in another direction, so too should the auld gun sights.
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Northern Ireland24946 Posts
On January 25 2025 09:38 Sadist wrote:
I just dont get the anti FEMA thing other than the internet trolljob working. This feels like trying to break up the US. People can disagree about the federal governments job but if disaster response isnt there what the absolute fuck is the point of a federal government.
This while red state blue state thing is dumb. We are all purple states. Its just the demons in charge of the republican party and conservative media causing all this infighting.
I don’t really get it myself, not in a manner of disagreeing but I don’t really understand who this appeals to.
If a state is hit by some brutal natural disaster, surely by default it’s less well-placed to respond than those who collectively aren’t? It’s like mandating that the person who has a heart attack perform CPR on themselves rather than the nearby healthy bystanders who are in a much better spot to successfully deliver it.
I know FEMA historically features in nonsense conspiracy theories so maybe that’s it?
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United States24660 Posts
I'd sooner see Trump declaring "FEMA will only respond to states that voted for me in the general election."
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On January 25 2025 09:46 micronesia wrote:
I'd sooner see Trump declaring "FEMA will only respond to states that voted for me in the general election."
You may be saying this in jest, but this is exactly how Trump's brain works. Whoever doesn't jump when he says jump is automatically the enemy.
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On January 25 2025 01:18 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2025 07:31 WombaT wrote:On January 24 2025 03:20 GreenHorizons wrote:The calls for informing on immigrants to your local gestapo are already going out After watching billionaires fighting to kiss Trump's ass like this is the premier of a new Apprentice I fully expect cities and states to help him crackdown on immigrants under threats of prosecution by Trump. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has directed prosecutors to investigate officials who resist immigration enforcement efforts, intensifying a sweeping crackdown that Trump launched the day he took office.
In a memo seen by Reuters, Trump's acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, told Justice Department staff that state and local authorities must cooperate with the immigration crackdown and federal prosecutors "shall investigate incidents involving any such misconduct for potential prosecution." www.reuters.com Predictably gross. I feel your fine sig quote is often apt, but it feels even more so now. People like to look at history and think 'If that was me back then, I would have...' We're living through history, and the truth is, whatever you are doing now is probably what you would have done then" + Show Spoiler +
If the driving force of such sentiment really was legitimate concerns about employment prospects and the likes, one would expect to see at least a decent fraction of that anger directed to businesses that hire illegal migrants and clamping down there too.
That it is not remotely close proportionally says rather a lot about the motivations of folks who would likely have touted on Anne Frank if they lived in a different time and place
. About that sig quote... Look guys, it is going to be at least a year before you are even thinking about falling in line behind Democrats (besides spending the next year or so making excuses for their impotence/incompetence). What harm would there be in redirecting a fraction of the time you'll spend arguing the most inane things you can with BJ, oBlade, posters like that, to sincerely exploring whether revolutionary socialism might offer something better than lib/Dem politics? At least while you wait to find out who you'll be voting for almost 2 years from now. I don't expect everyone that gives revolutionary socialism a try to become one, but I'm confident that anyone here that refuses to try while perpetually engaging in bad faith distractions with the BJs and oBlades simply isn't serious about wanting to stop the rise of fascism in the US. You all tried the Democrat strategy. They have nothing for you to do until it's voting time again. Just TRY revolutionary socialism (I'd settle for socialism generally at this point) on for a bit. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
We already do consider revolutionary socialism. And the consideration is that it has no depth to the concept. Its just a naive underdeveoped utopian ideal. Every "solution" is "lets just make everything worse so it can possibly be better".
Its watching star trek and saying "yeah this is the world we should be striving for and is where we should be developing to" and then forgetting that it requires magic level tech to handwave issues away.
We live in houses that are shitty, the solution isn't burning down the house so we can rebuild it better from scratch. We still have to live in that house. Everyone knows the house isn't shitty, it would be really helpful if you could help us convince the other half of the people who live in the house to try and improve it instead of being manipulated by them to help them make the house worse.
If nothing else, why are you expecting people to ally with you when you refuse to ally with them? You've been nothing but an insufferable ass to the people who are at least close to you politically. At least BJ and Oblade have actual positions to argue against instead of nebulous idealism that has no substance to it.
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On January 25 2025 09:43 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2025 09:38 Sadist wrote:
I just dont get the anti FEMA thing other than the internet trolljob working. This feels like trying to break up the US. People can disagree about the federal governments job but if disaster response isnt there what the absolute fuck is the point of a federal government.
This while red state blue state thing is dumb. We are all purple states. Its just the demons in charge of the republican party and conservative media causing all this infighting. I don’t really get it myself, not in a manner of disagreeing but I don’t really understand who this appeals to. If a state is hit by some brutal natural disaster, surely by default it’s less well-placed to respond than those who collectively aren’t? It’s like mandating that the person who has a heart attack perform CPR on themselves rather than the nearby healthy bystanders who are in a much better spot to successfully deliver it. I know FEMA historically features in nonsense conspiracy theories so maybe that’s it?
FEMA is 50 years old and spends $33 billion a year. The world didn't end before they existed and it hasn't been saved by their grace. They had no pandemic preparedness, they messed up Katrina I was there, they interfered with housing and aid for victims of Helene, in general they take working administrative structures of states, assume control and subordinate them to themselves during a disaster, and thereby replace what those states are doing with standard federal bureaucratic incompetence and inefficiency.
For competently governed states, their environment engenders specific disaster risks. Florida doesn't have to deal with wildfires and blizzards. California doesn't get Category 5 hurricanes. Each state should be the expert at meeting their region's challenges, which is why Texas and Florida are in good shape - causes of California's bad luck with forestry and water policy remain a mystery.
Also, because disasters are rare, FEMA's competence doesn't get tested enough to keep them on their toes when left to their own devices. If you leave a juicy federal agency lying around without a clear message and objective, Democrats when they wander back into power find ways to coopt it to things like racial justice and housing illegal migrants, after running out of money for hurricane season, as happened last year. The people get nothing in return for the bloat. Certain states get complacent because they think their parent the federal government will take care of them so they don't need to do anything.
Better to eliminate or significantly downsize, disburse appropriate aid directly, encourage better state leadership. Because the immediate heavy lifting is always done by first responders, national guard/military asset activation, the aid can be directly disbursed, and they just aren't good at their jobs despite having had decades of chances to prove themselves.
Credulous nominativism is one of the biggest obstacles to the current politics cycle. Wanting to get rid of an agency called FEMA doesn't mean thinking people should be on their own in emergencies any more than wanting to get rid of the PATRIOT Act means you aren't a patriot or opposing the Affordable Care Act or Inflation Reduction Act means you want expensive healthcare and inflation.
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United States24660 Posts
States should definitely be prepared to handle emergencies in their own borders, generally speaking. However, centralizing some aspects of response still makes sense. If only one widget of type X, plus one spare, is ever going to be needed at once, and not for the first few hours of the emergency, it doesn't make sense for all fifty States to acquire two copies of widget X. The federal government should acquire them and then send them to wherever they are needed. In other words, there's surely need for improvement at FEMA, but there's also direct benefit to FEMA handling things that make more sense at a federal level, which is certainly not everything.
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If Trump aims to annex Canada then the best path is 1 province at a time. The two provinces who've been the most friendly since Trump became Prez are the two provinces with the most separatist ambitions. Trump's catch phrase "drill baby drill" is music to the ears of any Albertan. The Alberta Premier recently advocated for Trump's perspective stating he is tired of Canada "not pulling its own weight".
If a province like Quebec or Alberta makes a special deal with the USA it'll be tough for the rest of Canada to remain unified.
In general, Canada's energy sector is doomed. As long as Canada's #1 concern is saving the environment its energy production costs will continue to skyrocket and the USA will take over everything.
"Drill Baby Drill" 
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The idea to burn all the accessible hydrocarbons that formed over hundreds of millions of years, in 100-150 years is pretty insane.
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On January 25 2025 00:57 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2025 23:49 Salazarz wrote:Yes I really don't see how the existence/employment of white people is problematic, or troubling, or as Magic Powers said an "overabundance." You really don't think that it's a problem when a guy named John is 50% more likely to get a job interview than his clone who has the exact same experiences and skill set but happens to be named Ahmed, or another clone of his with exact same experiences and skill set that just happens to have a vagina instead of a penis? Like, I really hope this is just some kind of a misunderstanding, but you're really going to have to elaborate on this because I don't really see how else to read your comment. Okay I notice you avoided the question that was supposed to trap you into admitting that the proportion vs. population per se can't be touted as a problem. Since you did ask politely let me address this new/related issue - apparent blind probability to get called into an interview, with as frank detail as I can: 1) Many things in the world are problems, the government is not always the vehicle to solve them. They may not always even be solvable, or they may actually be presenting as aspects of other problems. 2) You may be underestimating, or have completely overlooked, the fact people named Ahmed may have higher in-group preferences for hiring than Johns as well. Yet there aren't as many of them in the US, so them calling each other back wouldn't show up in the very general statistic brought here. Due to variance, Ahmed may have cases of way above average callbacks, and way below average callbacks, whether dealing with his in groups or not. Additionally, their probability of landing a job per callback may not be identical. Think about what you're saying. People discriminate against Ahmed because of his name. Imagine how interested in him a firm would have to be to get past that filter and then actually call him back, right? The job is as good as his for all we know. 3) If Ahmed has a base of 50 callbacks and John has 75 and they both get a job anyway, I can't commit to seeing there is much of a problem here, still. Like what are we talking about, did Ahmed and John's resumes both contain their 4 years at St. Christopher's Catholic School under education? This is not pure facetiousness; I really believe the ability for social science researchers to correctly conduct a blind controlled experiment with a middle school level statistic and get any meaningful conclusion about the world should be taken with a grain of salt. 4) People with Jewish names are less likely to get calls back, but make more money than the national average. Is this balanced, a fair penalty that evens out, or do we need affirmative action for them while using 1960s EOs to force companies to lower their pay and redistribute it to coworkers/subordinates? These are all hopefully difficult questions, that happily remain rhetorical - as long as we don't adopt the mantle of social engineering hubris that modern leftism would mandate us to. 5) Forcing Google to raise Ahmed's frontend developer salary by 30% and promote him to team lead does not remedy the fact that there are poor, un(der)educated Ahmeds out there with grim communities and prospects. At all. It helps: Possibly an HR employee, a consultant, a government official, and maybe even a lawyer justify their existence. Oh and it helps the already comfy upper/middle class Ahmed who has a career at a Magnficent 7 company. This is certainly good for employment, but not in the way we want - it does nothing for the real Ahmed we should be worried about or have empathy for. It in fact placates us as we pat ourselves on the back for thinking we achieved something, while not understanding anything about the complications of the world. 6) There are thresholds in the law (something like 5/15/25/50 employees depending on the regulation) where the government presumably realizes it can't bother distinguishing discrimination from basic free association among small groups of people re:employment. Or that it would be just Orwellian/prohibitively difficult to attempt to. Other than that, there are labor laws in place, there are regulators and there are lawyers ready to sue at a moment's notice as it remains illegal to discriminate under protected characteristics. I tend to find those protections acceptable as is, if applied and applied correctly.
So in other words, it's okay if Ahmed's job opportunities are limited due to his name (or skin color), but if a white guy doesn't get his preferred job once in a while due to DEI initiatives, now that is a problem, am I reading your stance right?
I don't think anyone in this thread believes that diversity and inclusion can be brute forced by mandating all minorities get an X% raise to bring them up to national average, or by introducing hard quotas for every job position, or anything else similarly ridiculous -- I certainly don't. But there's a whole lot of ground to cover between 'let the invisible hand of the free market decide' and 'hire X number of gay black communist women or be prosecuted by federal law.'
When Ahmed gets 50 callbacks while John gets 75 while applying for the same jobs with the same CV, that is a massive problem. When Timmy gets paid $100,000 but Willy, who has the exact same experiences and qualifications yet happens to be black, gets paid $80,000 doing the same job, that is a massive problem. Lashing out at the fight against inequality as 'leftist propaganda' and 'made up social studies bullshit' is ridiculous given how severely minorities continue to be disadvantaged in the US. If you thought existing DEI initiatives aren't all effective and could be improved, I'd be amongst the first to agree with you. But I don't see you proposing any actual solutions, and the whole 'just hire the best candidate for the role lul' thing doesn't actually work in the real world.
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I think there's a fair discussion to be had about administratory overreach and overregulation making the bureaucratic moloch devour everything in its path.
There's a call to deregulate in the EU and I can only see these calls becoming louder as we price ourselves out of more and more markets. We need leaner bureaucracy. It can't be the case that the way these systems exist are the best and most efficient.
However, I doubt making a DOGE with Musk and Ramaswami at the helm is the way to do it.
Does the US have something akin to audit organ or is it just that legislation passes and a new thing is developed and stacked on top of the already existing things and so now people have to also deal with new untelligible admin stuff that seemiglngly comes out of nowhere? Any US legislative implementers here?
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Tbf, at my job I recently got the job to modernize a piece of code. As a Data Scientist this isn't a very frequent thing, and the oldest bits of code are only 7-8 years old, so it shouldn't even be that bad. However, being a Data Scientist means the code was written by Data Scientists, and our company only fairly recently put any kind of quality control in place for DS code (and actually using the CI/CD pipelines properly are mostly optional), so the code is a mess. Some parts I have scrapped, some parts I have rewritten, and some parts I have rebuilt from the ground up, because what was there was an awful tangled mess of spaghetti code tied together with duct tape and super glue.
I can certainly appreciate that every piece of legislation needs to be modernized and cleaned up every few years. Probably not as often as software because most legislation isn't continuously worked on for years. But other than that, some will have been drafted by politics' equivalent of data scientists (people whose first experience drafting laws is when they reach congress), and using paradigms that are ridiculously outdated. And some will be timeless masterpieces that need the barest of retouching every decade or so. But anything that isn't periodically reviewed is going to end up like banking software that is written in kobol, needs to run on a DOS 6.2 machine, and can only ingest excel sheets in their 1985 formatting...
In the Netherlands I know this process happens, but only because a friend of mine is a law professor who was asked to do this. She complained that it was more like charity than something they got paid for, but she found it very gratifying to go through old laws and their supplementary documentation and in some cases update them for a changed world. Obviously any changes need to be debated and voted on in parliament, but this process seems like another necessary piece of the wheels of a modern democracy. If that is not happening I can absolutely see decades upon decades of legislation and processes making a country unmanageable.
Important difference between the US and the Netherlands is of course that between civil and common law systems. Maybe in common law this updating process happens more naturally through the courts?
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On January 25 2025 09:38 Sadist wrote:
I just dont get the anti FEMA thing other than the internet trolljob working. This feels like trying to break up the US. People can disagree about the federal governments job but if disaster response isnt there what the absolute fuck is the point of a federal government.
This whole red state blue state thing is dumb. We are all purple states. Its just the demons in charge of the republican party and conservative media causing all this infighting. FEMA is because right now there is a disaster in a blue state, and therefor disaster aid is bad. That there are sometimes disasters in red states and that then disaster aid is good is a 'long' term thought their brains cannot comprehend.
Its Leopards eating face party, they don't get that the leopard also eats their face. Trump was after all elected to 'hurt the right people'.
As for red state vs blue state. The mistake is that you think your all Americans living in America while they never stopped waging the Civil War. They don't want you in 'Their' America.
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I have to say it's ironic how America's hegemony is unraveling for the same stupid reasons Russia repeatedly shot itself in the foot.
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On January 25 2025 18:43 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2025 09:38 Sadist wrote:
I just dont get the anti FEMA thing other than the internet trolljob working. This feels like trying to break up the US. People can disagree about the federal governments job but if disaster response isnt there what the absolute fuck is the point of a federal government.
This whole red state blue state thing is dumb. We are all purple states. Its just the demons in charge of the republican party and conservative media causing all this infighting. FEMA is because right now there is a disaster in a blue state, and therefor disaster aid is bad. That there are sometimes disasters in red states and that then disaster aid is good is a 'long' term thought their brains cannot comprehend. Its Leopards eating face party, they don't get that the leopard also eats their face. Trump was after all elected to 'hurt the right people'. As for red state vs blue state. The mistake is that you think your all Americans living in America while they never stopped waging the Civil War. They don't want you in 'Their' America.
This is exactly it. One should never forget that all the stuff conservatives say are never their real reasons. It is just a bullshit smokescreen they put in front of the real reason they want things.
Right now, FEMA is helping democrats. That means that FEMA is bad.
That is all there is to it. Nothing more.
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On January 25 2025 16:41 Salazarz wrote:
When Ahmed gets 50 callbacks while John gets 75 while applying for the same jobs with the same CV, that is a massive problem.
For the record, this is the study cited previously in the thread, which is the most recent and largest study of its type.
The white/black gap was about 9% and they found no significant gap between men/women as some firms favored men and other firms favored women.
So the results of this study would tell us that Lakesha gets 50 callbacks while Adam and Jane get 55.
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On January 25 2025 19:13 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2025 18:43 Gorsameth wrote:On January 25 2025 09:38 Sadist wrote:
I just dont get the anti FEMA thing other than the internet trolljob working. This feels like trying to break up the US. People can disagree about the federal governments job but if disaster response isnt there what the absolute fuck is the point of a federal government.
This whole red state blue state thing is dumb. We are all purple states. Its just the demons in charge of the republican party and conservative media causing all this infighting. FEMA is because right now there is a disaster in a blue state, and therefor disaster aid is bad. That there are sometimes disasters in red states and that then disaster aid is good is a 'long' term thought their brains cannot comprehend. Its Leopards eating face party, they don't get that the leopard also eats their face. Trump was after all elected to 'hurt the right people'. As for red state vs blue state. The mistake is that you think your all Americans living in America while they never stopped waging the Civil War. They don't want you in 'Their' America. This is exactly it. One should never forget that all the stuff conservatives say are never their real reasons. It is just a bullshit smokescreen they put in front of the real reason they want things. Right now, FEMA is helping democrats. That means that FEMA is bad. That is all there is to it. Nothing more.
That makes no sense. The FEMA shit talk was just as bad some months ago after hurricanes tore up Florida/North Carolina, neither of which are blue states
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On January 25 2025 19:25 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2025 19:13 Simberto wrote:On January 25 2025 18:43 Gorsameth wrote:On January 25 2025 09:38 Sadist wrote:
I just dont get the anti FEMA thing other than the internet trolljob working. This feels like trying to break up the US. People can disagree about the federal governments job but if disaster response isnt there what the absolute fuck is the point of a federal government.
This whole red state blue state thing is dumb. We are all purple states. Its just the demons in charge of the republican party and conservative media causing all this infighting. FEMA is because right now there is a disaster in a blue state, and therefor disaster aid is bad. That there are sometimes disasters in red states and that then disaster aid is good is a 'long' term thought their brains cannot comprehend. Its Leopards eating face party, they don't get that the leopard also eats their face. Trump was after all elected to 'hurt the right people'. As for red state vs blue state. The mistake is that you think your all Americans living in America while they never stopped waging the Civil War. They don't want you in 'Their' America. This is exactly it. One should never forget that all the stuff conservatives say are never their real reasons. It is just a bullshit smokescreen they put in front of the real reason they want things. Right now, FEMA is helping democrats. That means that FEMA is bad. That is all there is to it. Nothing more. That makes no sense. The FEMA shit talk was just as bad some months ago after hurricanes tore up Florida/North Carolina, neither of which are blue states Wasn't that complaining that FEMA wasn't doing enough for them?
Like literally the exact opposite of what they are doing now.
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Why do Conservatives even accept FEMA Money?
Mustn't they bark at it like other communists feats? Like Socialized Healthcare or Forgiven Student debt?
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EPT
